Methodology
Commercial Products
Commercial User GuideHobbyist and Research Products
Help & Support
Grid Aggregations for distributed solar forecasting
Eliminate the need for repetitive API requests with aggregated data. Learn more about a more efficient way to generate historical and forecast estimates for your numerous solar sites.
Grid Aggregations are built for you
If your solar mission requires you to generate forecasts or historical estimates for many individual solar sites (hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands) and these PV systems can be grouped together in a meaningful format (e.g. by geographic region), then you may be much better off creating a Grid Aggregation instead of programming many repeat GET requests from our solar radiation and/or PV power output API.
In our experience, we find many users will dig into our API documentation or client libraries, see that they can retrieve PV power output or radiation requests, and then proceed to hit our API hundreds or thousands of times an hour to sample a wide region of data.
To us, these API call behaviours look something like this:
Or like this:
If you're considering (or already are) using our API in this format, then you should read on!
Our Grid Aggregations product was designed with you in mind
With a Grid Aggregation, users who have thousands of locations to model can instead privately share basic PV installation metadata with our team, so we can deploy a custom API endpoint which models all of the PV sites for you, and categorise them according to the region or electrical network asset of your choice.
Instead of directly using our API for each PV site in your list of installations, you can let us make these computations much more efficiently (saving your time & money!) in our cloud based forecasting system. Using this approach, we match up the location and characteristics of your solar sites with the our rapid-update cloud and irradiance modelling capability and then deliver the aggregated (summed) total power output to you as a single API endpoint for each region of interest.
For each region you design, we deliver estimates in total power (MW) or performance units (such as % of total capacity) which update every 5 to 15 minutes, and provide forecasts out through 7 days ahead. They can also be used to estimated historical solar generation.
What can I use Grid Aggregations for?
This product is quite dynamic and is tailored specifically to customer requirements, and are used to:
- Train and improve load forecasting models to include the impacts of behind-the-meter solar generation
- Manage low voltage network short and medium term 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
- Account for the impacts of cloud cover on specific periods of demand, such a early morning or during periods of low demand and high solar production
Create you own grid aggregation and evaluate for free
To get started, send us a request for a sample upload file format, and discuss your use case in more detail. We'll have your Grid Aggregation live in our system within 2-3 days and will provide you with unique forecasting and estimated actuals API endpoints for your evaluation. Start your free trial now!