Disneyland provided the backdrop for the Solar Power International (SPI) conference in Anaheim this year. As the biggest solar-focused conference in the U.S., exhibiting at SPI provides a great opportunity to find out firsthand what is on the mind of the industry—that...
Originally published in the March/April issue of Solar Today. Within the solar industry, it's common knowledge that the optimal orientation of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in the Northern Hemisphere is typically south, to maximize electricity production over the...
Last week, the Utility Variable-Generation Integration Group (UVIG) recognized Tom Hoff, Clean Power Research founder and president of Research and Consulting, with an award for his ongoing contributions to solar forecasting. The ability to forecast the output of tens...
Solar resources naturally vary from year to year, and 2014 was no exception. While the 2014 average monthly solar resource map shows expected patterns, with the greatest energy output in the southwest, the real story is revealed by the PV power variance map. The PV...
Itron and Clean Power Research are embarking on the next phase of research that will lead to high-fidelity distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) forecasts, and integration of those forecasts into net load forecasts for the California Independent System Operator (ISO)....
While we all know that the energy production of solar PV systems can vary temporally on the short term (e.g., hourly and daily basis), monthly to annual variability can significantly affect the ongoing status of a developed PV solar asset. For developers and owners of...
If you stopped by the Clean Power Research booth (#118) at the most recent Solar Power International (SPI) Conference in Las Vegas, you would have noticed a tall metal frame supporting some measurement equipment. While this structure could have passed for a new-age...
In our previous two posts, we described how to incorporate PV diversity (diversity in both design configuration and geography) in fleet-level modeling, and how to generate high frequency fleet power data with 60-second temporal resolution. In this post, we will show...
Our previous post discussed how to produce solar PV production profiles for fleets of PV systems. In it we highlighted the importance of including both system diversity (tilt, orientation, shading, etc.), and geographical diversity (system locations and relative...