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James Luffman
Big accuracy gains for Europe
Solcast forecast improvement is already live for solar operators! Check out how Solcast achieved a relative ~10% error improvement with the integration of high-resolution ICON-EU weather model.
James Luffman
Solcast forecast improvement is already live for solar operators! Check out how Solcast achieved a relative ~10% error improvement with the integration of high-resolution ICON-EU weather model.
Harry Woods
Check out the unique view of the eclipse showing the live actuals for the eclipse path and weather impacts on irradiance. The effects on solar generation across American assets and grids were analysed using the Solcast API.
Dr. Hugh Cutcher
Get ready for the April 8th solar eclipse across the US, a key event for eclipse watchers and solar power managers. This interactive forecast map uses cloud tracking built for the solar industry to show the latest forecast for cloud thickness during the eclipse.
Dr. Hugh Cutcher
A Saharan dust event impacted solar irradiance across Europe in February, resulting in up to 25% daily losses. Discover how advanced aerosol handling can help you prepare for events like this.
Harry Woods
Accurate day-ahead forecasts are essential for informed planning, enabling efficient operational dispatch and energy storage. It helps you prevent issues like grid instability, regulatory violations, and financial losses.
Dr. Hugh Cutcher
Solcast analysis has revealed that 2023 was the sunniest year of the century, with many regions experiencing irradiance levels 10% or more above long-term trends.
James Luffman
Solcast achieves a significant milestone with DNV's validation of its satellite irradiance data, proving its bankability across more than 200 sites worldwide. Learn how this could improve your solar projects.
Dr. Hugh Cutcher
On April 8, a total eclipse will pass from Mexico, across Texas, and up the East Coast. With the increasing solar capacity in the US, the grid impact of major solar events is also growing. Explore our early forecast on how the eclipse will impact US grids.
Dr. Hugh Cutcher
Evaluating PV Power models is essential to understand how your model processes data and considers PV Power losses. Here is a detailed guide to help you assess a forecast dataset.
Harry Woods
The latest release of the PVLIB tool version is designed to help more users to easily fetch Solcast data for more seamless integration.
Harry Woods
Understanding weather patterns and their impact on solar production is crucial for making well-informed decisions about your solar projects. Learn how Wärtsilä Energy integrated Solcast’s 5-minute data for improved forecasting and workflow.
Harry Woods
Reliable solar data is critical when planning, designing, and building residential solar assets to ensure maximized energy generation potential. Learn how Aurora Solar enhanced its platform with Solcast TMY data, empowering more residential solar professionals.
Dr. Hugh Cutcher
Evaluating forecast irradiance data is essential in ensuring that you're using a reliable data to effectively design and operate your solar assets. Here is a detailed guide to help you assess a forecast dataset.
Harry Woods
Managing off-grid energy storage requires accurate forecast data. Discover how GKN Hydrogen integrated the Solcast API for improved control strategy in this case study.
Dr. Hugh Cutcher
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.
Harry Woods
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.
Solcast Team
Designed for ease and efficiency, our SDK eliminates boilerplate code, so you can concentrate on building your project, not wrestling with APIs.
Dr. Hugh Cutcher
See how the October 2023 annular eclipse impacted solar power production across American Power Grids, the United States and Central and South America.
Solcast Team
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.
Solcast Team
Explore the critical role of aerosols in solar irradiance and how Solcast's aerosol modelling provides a more comprehensive irradiance data.
Solcast Team
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.
Solcast Team
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.
Solcast Team
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.
James Luffman
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.
James Luffman
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
James Luffman
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.
Dr. Hugh Cutcher
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.
James Luffman
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.
James Luffman
Sometimes we get asked “what’s the difference between Solcast data and forecasts from the (many) generic weather apps and APIs?”.
James Luffman
Solcast announces they are joining forces with DNV to drive adoption of global solar irradiance data.
Gino Zem
Alex Jarkey is the newest employee at Solcast and has taken on the demanding role of CTO.
James Luffman
Users working in the Solcast API Toolkit can now interact with the latest version of the Solcast API!
Solcast Team
We get a special mention in this week's Wall Street Journal - Sustainable Business section.
Solcast Team
WE are proud to announce that we have won the Southeast Asia Innovation Challenge 2022 after our attendance at Enlit Asia in Bangkok.
James Luffman
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!
James Luffman
Actually, it's 5-minute #solar data from the Solcast API, made by tracking cloud movements minute-by-minute, globally!
James Luffman
Solcast day-ahead irradiance and power forecasts are now improved by 15% to 35%
Solcast Team
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.
James Luffman
O&Ms and monitoring & analytics companies are using satellite-derived irradiance data, at increasing scale
Solcast Team
Solcast TMY data is now available directly from within PVsyst. Plan your next solar project with confidence (& free data!)
Solcast Team
New Ways to Access High Quality TMY and Monthly Averages Data, Affordably and with No Long-term Commitments
Dr. Nick Engerer
Solcast presents the results of a two year project developing and refining short-term nowcasting solutions for solar farms and the Australian energy sector
Dr. Nick Engerer
Do you love podcasts? We do! Now you can combine your interest in Solcast with the wonderful world of podcasting.
Dr. Nick Engerer
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.
Dr. Nick Engerer
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.
Dr. Nick Engerer
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.
Dr. Nick Engerer
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.
Dr. Nick Engerer
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.
Dr. Nick Engerer
"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-
Ben King
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 150m<sup>2</sup> elevation grid.
Dr. Nick Engerer
"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.
James Luffman
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.
Dr. Nick Engerer
Don't be a forecast validation super-hero. Just get the job done. Three time and sanity saving tips from our CTO.
Dr. Nick Engerer
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!
Dr. Nick Engerer
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.
Dr. Nick Engerer
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.
Dr. Nick Engerer
Why are solar power forecasting technologies important for energy markets?
Dr. Nick Engerer
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
Dr. Nick Engerer
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!
Dr. Nick Engerer
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
Dr. Nick Engerer
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
James Luffman
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.
James Luffman
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.
James Luffman
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.