Blog

Evaluating Accuracy is essential when selecting a solar data provider, make sure you're completing the right level of validation for your needs, and find easy solutions to the challenges of data validation.

Hear from Solcast's James Luffman and DNV's Dana Olson on why DNV acquired Solcast, and how solar data is powering the solar industry.

Designed for ease and efficiency, our SDK eliminates boilerplate code, so you can concentrate on building your project, not wrestling with APIs.

See how the October 2023 annular eclipse impacted solar power production across American Power Grids, the United States and Central and South America.

Learn how snow soiling impacts assets and grids, and how Solcast's models account for snow soiling levels in power modelling, grid aggregations and more.

Explore the critical role of aerosols in solar irradiance and how Solcast's aerosol modelling provides a more comprehensive irradiance data.

Discover how Solcast uses satellite imagery and weather forecasts to build 5 minute cloud tracking models and provide irradiance data for everywhere in the world.

El Niño historically brings increased cloud cover to most of North America, negatively impacting solar production compared to the long term average. Learn more about the climatological impacts of El Niño has had in the United States and Canada historically and what that means for solar generation from your assets.

Discover how Victron Energy is utilizing Solcast's global solar irradiance data to power their innovative new Solar Forecasts feature. Explore how this collaboration is shaping the future of solar energy.

Until last week, Solcast only supported user-supplied horizons, and only for our Advanced PV Model data product. It was a good start that we made a couple of years ago, but we wanted to go further.

Explore the indispensable role of accurate irradiance nowcasts in optimizing solar power generation. Uncover how these short-term forecasts are built and how they help improve efficiency, reduce costs, and contribute to the energy transition in the solar industry

Explore the role of satellite data quality and climate change in solar resource estimation, and learn why Solcast's historical time series data starts from 2007 for more accurate solar irradiance assessments.

Solcast has now joined DNV, as announced February 1st 2023. For our customers, nothing is changing. Solcast is still operating from our Sydney Office. We have the same great team and products - and DNV is investing to support our growth.

Discover the rare hybrid solar eclipse over Australia on April 20, 2023, and explore its impact on solar irradiance. Dive into the technical details behind our cutting-edge modelling techniques and the implications for the Western Australia power grid.

Sometimes we get asked “what’s the difference between Solcast data and forecasts from the (many) generic weather apps and APIs?”.

Solcast announces they are joining forces with DNV to drive adoption of global solar irradiance data.

Alex Jarkey is the newest employee at Solcast and has taken on the demanding role of CTO.

Users working in the Solcast API Toolkit can now interact with the latest version of the Solcast API!

We get a special mention in this week's Wall Street Journal - Sustainable Business section.

WE are proud to announce that we have won the Southeast Asia Innovation Challenge 2022 after our attendance at Enlit Asia in Bangkok.

The upgraded version of the Solcast API, only available for now via contacting sales@solcast.com.au, contains a hugely-expanded set of 30+ data parameters!

Actually, it's 5-minute #solar data from the Solcast API, made by tracking cloud movements minute-by-minute, globally!

Solcast day-ahead irradiance and power forecasts are now improved by 15% to 35%

Solcast API Toolkit users can now access Solcast TMY data directly from within SAM through the use of a new software script. This script is available on GitHub. This short tutorial will show you how to import and use Solcast TMY data.

O&Ms and monitoring & analytics companies are using satellite-derived irradiance data, at increasing scale

Solcast TMY data is now available directly from within PVsyst. Plan your next solar project with confidence (& free data!)

New Ways to Access High Quality TMY and Monthly Averages Data, Affordably and with No Long-term Commitments

Solcast presents the results of a two year project developing and refining short-term nowcasting solutions for solar farms and the Australian energy sector

Do you love podcasts? We do! Now you can combine your interest in Solcast with the wonderful world of podcasting.

Greece operates a 10GW peak load system, with nearly 17GW of capacity online as of 2017. As a result, changes in the day ahead and intraday markets have been introduced. These make solar energy forecasts highly important for maximising revenue and minimising penalty.

Solcast has an established history of collaboration with load forecasting tech company, TESLA Forecast. Together, we're taking on the next generation of rooftop solar challenges in South Australia. Learn more in our case study.

An innovative live demonstration of gridded, automatic renewable generation forecasts in South Australia (SA) is set to lead the way for a national roll-out of next generation energy forecasting.

The key limitations of Meteonorm's representativeness lie within the use of 1) interpolated and 2) synthetic data. Interpolations rely heavily on surface observation data, which are not equally distributed. Synthetic estimates are useful when high quality direct observational data does not exist. However, given the presence of a global fleet of high resolution weather satellites that directly image cloud cover - this is not the case.

Browse animated solar radiation maps in your area of interest - updated daily! Includes a history, broken down by date with global coverage. It's our new solar radiation map archive and it's totally rad.

"We enjoy a considerable amount of hot and sunny weather in Malaysia but we also have very low cloud cover. The other challenge is of course electricity generated must be used immediately." -TNB Chairman Tan Sri Leo Moggie-

We're committed to maintaining an industry-leading solar resource dataset, with a continuous company focus on improving the accuracy of our data. In this post, we explore the new 150m² elevation grid.

"Despite the fact that solar power is a valuable capacity addition to the power system which is facing difficulties in power supplies, a large number of solar power plants coming into operation in a short period have been causing many challenges to the operation of power system." - EVN NLDC.

Solar power forecasting is becoming essential for successful grid integration in Ukraine. Accurate forecasts can help with day-ahead bidding of power, by allowing larger bids and/or reducing imbalance or accuracy penalties.

Don't be a forecast validation super-hero. Just get the job done. Three time and sanity saving tips from our CTO.

Owners and operators of solar farms already have one too many things to think about. Compliance items stack up by the thousands very quickly. Utilities providing their network connections can impose new requirements without warning. Manufacturers of key components can go bankrupt and leave you without an important spare part! Don't let setting up solar forecasting technology at your asset be another pain-point. Use the Solcast API Toolkit!

The principal input to the rate of return calculation for a solar farm asset is the expected revenue generation from the solar farm. This highlights the importance of high quality solar irradiance data: revenue generation is primarily influenced by the availability of solar irradiance at that location over time.

Through creation of customised Solcast Grid Aggregations for the behind the meter solar installed downstream of a particular zone substation, this distribution network was finally able to correct the apparent (net) demand profiles for the impacts of cloud cover.

Why are solar power forecasting technologies important for energy markets?

Learn about how the Eclipse X solar car team uses solar forecasting in its race strategy!

Solar GIS data includes both a given location (latitude and longitude), plus time-series information (attribute) about the historical, live or forecast solar irradiance and weather at that location.

Solar power forecasting is at its core a weather forecasting problem. It starts with modeling of the Sun's position with respect to a given location at the Earth's surface, before then modeling the transmittance of solar radiation through the Earth's atmosphere.

In this post, Solcast dives into its historical and TMY data offering. This includes a brief review of methods plus the basics on historical Time Series data, typical meteorological year data and monthly averages data.

Solcast took a close look at the way solar farm financiers, developers and due diligence firms were accessing the historical and TMY solar data services they needed. Our conclusion? The whole process was overdue for overhaul!

We are delighted to announce that EVN Vietnam has recently signed up as a Solcast customer for both our solar power forecasting and wind energy forecasting solutions

Starting this month, Solcast and Meteocontrol have begun a global partnership, including data for nearly 50,000 locations around the world. That's the power of the Solcast API!

Solcast recently presented two high profile talks at the Asia Utility Week event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This included a 5-minute 'pitch', which you can watch in the included material.

How Solcast is using sky cameras and live SCADA information to improve short range solar power forecasting and solar irradiance forecasting

This article introduces the basics on how Solcast creates its solar irradiance data including how it uses satellite images and solar radiation models.

As soon as penetrations of behind the meter solar PV sites reach 1-2% of total load, forecasting the power output of these PV systems starts to become critical for efficient market and network operation. Without including a behind the meter solar forecast into the overall load forecasting operations, errors in the daily load forecast start to appear. Thankfully, Solcast's Grid Aggregations are easy to set-up, are highly accurate, and can help solve this challenging problem!

A brief look at where the use of numerical weather models falls short for solar irradiance forecasting

Eight of Australia’s large-scale solar farms will partner with Solcast to utilise our Super Rapid Update forecasting product for 5-minute ahead solar power forecasting.

India has shown great leadership with its aggressive solar installation targets. With its state distribution companies now due to enforce penalties for inaccurate solar forecasts, it would be quite wise to also show leadership in its implementation of its solar forecasting technologies and network/market operations by choosing modern approaches.

A free high quality dataset of PV system power measurements from 1,287 residential installations across Australia

Solar farm operators are coming under growing pressure to help maintain network stability by providing accurate generation forecasts. As our CTO Dr. Nick Engerer writes, innovations in short-term forecasting are providing operators with new options for making this task less of a distraction from their core business

Generic weather APIs can be cool and cheap, but there are some fundamental reasons why they don’t work well for solar energy

We offer a simple PV power conversion model, which connects our global, rapid-update cloud nowcasting system with the location and installed capacity of the target PV system. We then generate an estimate of the future power output of each site, which you can instantly access via our API

We use our rapid update cloud and irradiance modelling capability and combine it with information about the spatial distribution and installed capacities of your PV fleet to deliver live, forecast and historical estimates fleet performance.

You can get started with the Solcast API services in less than five minutes. Sign-up for our API and instantly access our global solar forecasting (0-7 days) and estimated actuals dataset (last 7 days). You can also model and forecast utility scale solar farms, create your own grid aggregations and generate forecasts for individual rooftop PV sites trial upon request. Historical data downloads of up to 10 years of data are also available!

No source of information is more important for the solar energy industry than solar irradiance data! Our team believes we have the most accurate and most widely available historical, live and forecast solar radiation data available, and we are committed to improving it every week.

With such high penetrations of small-scale solar present across Australia and several new large solar farms in the pipeline, Solcast believes that solar forecasting technology will be important for maintaining predictability and stability in our power system.

My Solar and Storage 2017 talk entitled "Solar forecasting support for Australia energy networks & markets via the Solcast API" will cover our experience working with 11 Aussie distribution networks and our vision for providing them solutions to solar intermittency.

But I want to challenge you to change your mindset, and change the game. Let's view intermittency as the opportunity it really is. Technology can solve the intermittency "problem" and the companies that do so will create value. The obstacle is the way.

When a few hundreds of megawatts of solar generation undergoes a negative ramp event, the energy markets see a sudden jump in the regional demand and local distribution networks will see changes in network loads/voltages in their control rooms. This leads to challenges managing our electricity markets and networks in areas where large amounts of solar are installed.

Solcast wants to give you the data you need for your research work for FREE (no cash required!). As a researcher, we'll provide you with access to our Recent and Historical Solar Irradiance Data for non-commercial research use.

All around the world, solar owners are wondering the same thing: Are my solar panels performing as expected? How can I monitor my PV system's performance? Are my solar panels working? Use our FREE PV system performance estimator to find out!

Solcast is now committed to delivering the world's highest-resolution solar forecasting technologies to SAPN by the end of this year. Allowing SAPN to finally have the LV network visibility they require for managing & planning for their network operations.

Solar is an exponential technology. What this means, is that its price performance is falling on an exponential curve and its growth globally is growing upwards in the same fashion.

There were quite complicated cloud cover conditions over South Australia yesterday, where solar energy penetrations are amongst the highest in the world

It is becoming very important to pay great attention to the *detail* of how the wind & solar resource will change over the course of a given day in order to appropriately manage the balance of supply and demand

Next week, our CTO Dr. Nick Engerer will travel to Perth to join our collaborators at Western Power to host a webinar reviewing the rooftop solar related challenges in West Australia

This example highlights the important of having quality solar forecasting data for rooftop solar sites included in the load forecasting models for areas with high penetrations of rooftop solar.

In my role as CEO of Solcast, I've been directing my team to think more like the customer, and as a result, Solcast has been working to make the accuracy of its solar power forecasting highly visible. We are now storing our 1-hour ahead forecasts for everywhere in the world, and making them available to our customers & users in real time.

Behind the meter solar PV power forecasting is an essential tool for accurate supply and demand balance for grid operators. And with rooftop PV installations in Western Australia growing quickly, load forecasting is becoming increasingly difficult for our partner Western Power.

Solcast have worked diligently to enable the hard-working folks who are managing, operating and deploying utility scale solar farm sites by delivering on an easy to use and easy to understand forecasting solution via API

When we first launched the Solcast API in early 2017, the Solcast team was excited to learn more about the market for historical and forecast solar irradiance and solar power data services. Now, 18 months later, with nearly a thousand users across five continents, we see no better way to launch our company blog than by thanking those users for their commitment to the integration of solar energy, and for being such forward-thinking early adopters of the Solcast API. So - Thank you!