What happens when you leverage technologies like IBM’s artificial intelligence engine Watson for clean power? The answer is the awesomely named Watt-sun project, a machine learning platform that IBM Research has quietly been building over the last year, and which is now highly accurate at predicting how cloud cover, weather and atmosphere (among many other data points) affect the way solar panel systems operate. Solar forecasting has been around as long as solar panels have been plugged into the grid. But the forecasting systems historically haven’t been all that accurate, given that so many factors can contribute to the amount of sunlight that’s able to descend from the sky and onto the solar panel and then get converted into electricity.