On March 30, 2017, the Minnesota Department of Commerce along with its core team, kicked off its Department of Energy-funded MN Solar Pathways project aimed at finding the least-risk, best-value solutions for MN to achieve its solar energy goals. Clean Power Research...
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SolarAnywhere Posts
What is the value of accurate solar forecasting for utility-scale PV plants?
The importance and source of solar forecasting With an increasing number of installed utility-scale PV plants and a growing need for predictable energy generation, the solar industry has started paying attention to solar forecasting. The reasons behind this are: Solar...
SolarAnywhere detects calibration error in nation’s most trusted ground site
How accurate are SolarAnywhere® irradiance data? They are accurate enough to identify an undetected calibration error at one of the nation’s most trusted ground truth stations. Figure 1 presents Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) and Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI)...
How to reduce demand charges using solar forecasts
The challenge is well-known by commercial building owners and PV project developers: on site solar PV generation offers excellent energy savings to commercial customers, but can result in unreliable demand charge reduction benefits. Through a recent DOE funded...
The Future of the NREL Solar Prospector and Public Solar Data
Solar Prospector Sunsetting As many of you have heard, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will be sunsetting the Solar Prospector tool. The Solar Prospector tool was last updated in 2012 by NREL, and its purpose was to provide mapping and data analysis in...
Observational MET programs reduce uncertainty
This week, we're pleased to present a post from GroundWork® Renewables' CEO Ann Gaglioti. Measuring irradiance data in the field reduces the uncertainty of the energy production assessment and results in a measurable return on investment during project financing. In...
Quantifying day-ahead solar energy forecast uncertainty
Solar resource variability is an unavoidable natural characteristic that impacts solar power forecasting. However, its impact on forecast uncertainty can be reduced by providing information on predictive uncertainty, along with deterministic forecast values. Having...
Version control: Your bankable signpost in a digital world
If you own an iPhone, you’ve seen the familiar message “iOS 9.3.3 is available for your iPhone and is ready to install.” If you’re like me, you hit “Remind me later” a few dozen times before you actually install the update. Call me paranoid, but I always have to take...
Producing perfect PV fleet forecasts – at what cost?
In our last blog, we talked about the performance of SolarAnywhere® v4 PV fleet forecasts, and discussed how accuracy was a function of the PV fleet’s geographic footprint. For instance, SolarAnywhere hour-ahead forecasts in the Western U.S. were shown to have a...