@kevin1, here’s another solar goal I want to (philosophically at least) throw into the mix, seeded by this article in the NYTimes (amazing opening picture btw!)
Before I got to it in the article, I was thinking this very thought (to quote):
“Ms. Polos, a nurse, recalls the power going out 10 times in the past year. If she and her family need to get out because of a fire, she said, she wants to be able to keep her Nissan Leaf electric car charged.”
One of the factors in insolation is of course smoke (& pollution).
So in parsing solar data for indications of inverter anomalies and so on, and (at scale) being able to see cloud patterns, we can add smoke/pollution detection in there and more crucially (combining with wind data) tell your car when to charge for emergency escapes.