Solcast nowcasting solutions for solar farms and the Australian energy sector

07 December 2020

Short-term nowcasting for Australian Utility-Scale solar farms

This wide-reaching, 24 month project was a collaborative endeavour between Solcast (project lead), Dispatch Solutions (forecast submission and knowledge sharing), Bloomsky (sky-imager hardware), and eight Australian solar farms in the National Electricity Market (NEM).

The project’s key objectives were to operationalise, deploy, and improve Solcast’s self-forecasting technology, to submit these forecasts to the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) self-forecasting application programming interface (API), to demonstrate the accuracy of the forecasts in comparison to the Australian Solar Energy Forecast System (ASEFS), to evaluate potential reductions in Causer Pays Factors (CPF) for solar farm operators, and to develop and bring to market a commercial self-forecast solution. The Project partnerships facilitated a staged process of testing, trialling, and transitioning customers to a commercial service.

In this presentation I cover the key outcomes of the project, including examples of our forecasting technology, performance/accuracy of our technology against the ASEFS including analysis of performance between sites, and a case study looking at short-term forecasting applications for energy storage systems.

Dr. Nick Engerer

Dr. Nick Engerer

Solcast Co-founder • Author

Nick is an expert in the field of solar radiation and distributed solar PV modelling, and has co-founded Solcast out of a sincere desire to enable others to build the solar-powered future.

Read more about Dr. Engerer's scientific papers

Solar Power Forecasting