Grid Aggregations
Thousands of PV systems grouped by market regions or grid assets. Forecasts and estimated actuals updated every 5 to 15 minutes.
Solar visibility for markets and networks
Improve load forecasting, manage your network, or beat the market. Solcast Grid Aggregations pair up our global cloud nowcasting systems with PV installation mapping to provide forecast, historical and live estimates of total distributed solar power output. Useful for solar assets of all sizes, including behind-the-meter PV. Sign-up to our API and view live samples of one of the 750+ aggregations running live globally. Contact us to create your own.
Group PV forecasts according to your area of interest
Customised aggregate power outputs forecasts from solar PV systems of all sizes. Group them by market or geographic region. For added detail, group according to network assets (e.g. substation). Privately share basic PV installation data to quickly setup a demonstration.
Our customers use Grid Aggregations to:
Train and improve load forecasting models to include the impacts of behind-the-meter solar generation
Manage low voltage network demand forecasting, including planning for periods of minimum demand
Validate and tune models based on upscaling techniques or other surface data measurements
Manage spinning reserve or backup power supplies in tight demand situations or for remote grid applications
Dynamically control virtual power plants, including for the orchestration of low voltage network support services
Avoid the complexities of building in-house solutions, or to benchmark or improve existing in-house solutions
Features and benefits
- Live power forecast and estimated actuals data
- Probabilistic forecasting which includes 10th & 90th percentiles
- Aggregations can be provided top-down (via known pooled installations), or bottom-up (via live composition of tens to thousands of sites)
- Aggregations can be for any combination of sites, regions or network assets
- Privacy agreement for your shared data, including the ability to permanently delete
Specifications
| Data specifications | |
Parameters |
|
Forecast probabilities |
10th and 90th percentile forecasts provided for: PV Power (MW) PV Power Performance (%) |
Spatial coverage |
All continents (Rapid update actuals and forecast data) Global (forecasts) |
Time granularity |
5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes (period mean) |
Update frequency |
Every 10 or 15 minutes |
Time span (Forecast) |
Present time to +7 days ahead |
Time span (Live) |
7 days ago to present time |
Time span (Recent) |
4 months ago to 2 days ago |
Time span (Historical) |
12 years ago to 2 days ago |
| Power modelling - Configuration options | |
Minimum metadata you need to provide |
Region definition (political region names, or shapefile) Installed total PV capacity OR List of each PV site location and capacity |
Choose an existing Grid Aggregation to evaluate, or contact us to create your own!
If you’d like to see a real, live Grid Aggregation in action, you can create an account or login to the Solcast API Toolkit - if you register as a commercial user when creating your account, you’ll be assigned at least one live demo Grid Aggregation.
Because each Grid Aggregation consists of thousands of locations and takes effort to set up, you cannot currently set up your own (but this may change in the future). The only way to trial or purchase your own customised Grid Aggregation is via an Enterprise Solution - if you’re interested please contact us.
If you do wish to trial your own Grid Aggregation, you’ll need to send us some very basic georeferenced PV installation metadata. Get in touch with us for a sample upload file format, and to discuss your use case in more detail.
Once your aggregation goes live in our system (usually within 2-3 days), we’ll provide you with unique forecasting and estimated actuals API endpoints for your evaluation.
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