In developed countries, the simple act of charging a device such as a laptop or phone or speaking one of the most widely used languages around the world may seem ordinary. Yet, for millions around the world these are privileges – not guarantees. Electricity and language powers our ability to connect to never-ending swaths of knowledge and information. SIL Global is a faith-based, non-profit that teaches language skills to communities worldwide, including those that are isolated. The organization educates communities who often do not have access to an electric grid system to connect to the rest of the world. That is why SIL Global used the NASA Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) project’s globally accessible data to develop tools that power the technology needed to teach people in these communities language skills and connect them to endless knowledge and opportunities.
SIL Global, formerly SIL International, is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, but serves people across more than 100 countries. The organization needed a solution to power computers in remote locations that would help its educators accomplish tasks such as translating, teaching literacy, and researching. The company also needed to provide lighting for its buildings. That is why the SIL Global Africa Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Field Services team engineers designed backup power systems using solar panels to supply off-grid power. The engineers developed an application named the Solar Insolation Lookup Tool, or SILT, which informed how to optimize the solar panels’ energy and predict how many days a particular community can expect to not have enough solar exposure. This allowed them to plan accordingly both in terms of power output and associated costs. POWER’s data was an input to this tool.
"With the granularity of the free POWER data, we have the ability to provide solid, targeted solar power solutions for people in remote and developing parts of the world, empowering locals to perform their own cost-benefit analysis and choose the solution that will best meet their needs,” said a member of the team.
SILT used POWER’s application programming interface (API) to obtain key parameters from NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) and Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) hourly data at native resolution, to calculate the power output based on panel orientation and geographic location. This gave SILT the ability to predict power output for solar panel systems at any location in the world. The panels also charged batteries to provide backup power during times of less sun. The team aimed to avoid four consecutive days where solar panel output would be less than the needs of the load, resulting in what the team called “dead days” – net energy loss from the batteries. SILT could identify the number of monthly dead days so language workers and missionaries could manage their energy usage, such as adjusting work schedules or avoiding running multiple large devices at the same time to reduce consumption during periods of heavy clouds or rain. The tool also allowed users to adjust the load and panel array size to see how it affected the number of possible dead days. Engineers aimed to size the solar panels and battery banks large enough to limit energy shortages to less than 12 days per year.
In 2023, SIL Global said NASA POWER’s meteorological data helped them construct about three custom solar panel systems and 20 portable systems globally every year since 2018. Davis Conley, formerly with SIL Global, said POWER data also allowed the organization to save on costs, which meant more funds dedicated to SIL Global’s mission to help people.
“The difference in the amount of sun translates into the difference in price of what you have to pay to set up an adequate solar system, and the biggest cost in all of that is storage batteries,” said Conley. “And so, the smaller you can make your batteries and still survive, the cheaper it is.”
SIL Global’s use of NASA POWER data demonstrates how the data can be adapted to develop new tools that directly impact communities and benefit societies around the world. POWER data helped SIL Global light the way to opportunity with the development of off-grid energy solutions that bring knowledge and education directly to the communities it served.