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Clean Power Research & 8minute Solar Energy Partner on R&D for Probabilistic Forecasts
Renewables have dominated the growth of new bulk power generation sources over the past five years. Driven by favorable policy, rapid declines in cost, improvements in technology, and fast time to market, as of 2019, solar power plants made up 29 GW of the existing...
SolarAnywhere Version 3.5 Available: Improves Accuracy and Enables Bifacial Project Modeling
Clean Power Research is pleased to announce the launch of SolarAnywhere® version 3.5 (v3.5), which incorporates high-resolution aerosol and albedo data to improve accuracy and enable more accurate irradiance modeling, including bifacial project modeling. SolarAnywhere...
2020 regional solar deviation summary and North American wildfire smoke impact report
Wildfires diminished total sunlight in September 2020 by up to 20%, driving potential PV plant production risk Disaster preparedness—understanding and mitigating losses due to wind, hail and fire—is now a mainstream topic in the solar industry. In the United States...
SolarAnywhere® now available for Africa and West Asia
SolarAnywhere®, the industry’s leading solar data and intelligence service, now covers Africa and West Asia. With solar resource data available from 1999 through present and forecast, SolarAnywhere customers can access the accurate, consistent data they need for...
Purchase SolarAnywhere online, anytime: bankable solar data, on demand
When you have an important solar project deadline looming, you need reliable data—fast. Now you can purchase SolarAnywhere online anytime, ensuring you have access to the bankable solar data resources you need, when you need them. Our team is here to help, but for...
Solar performance monitoring in Europe and South America just got easier with SolarAnywhere real-time data
As renewables in Europe and South America continue to surge—with Europe generating more electricity from renewables than from fossil fuels for the first time in 2020—the ability to efficiently scale management of solar assets is critical. Whether ensuring long-term...
Record climate disasters, moderate solar deviations through Q3 2020
We’re introducing a major upgrade to our SolarAnywhere® solar deviation maps! The new maps expand coverage to three continents and increase resolution to ~50 km. The maps give asset managers and owners high-level insights into the weather trends affecting the...
What’s the value of your solar data? (And why the median approach to solar resource data selection falls short)
Are the solar industry’s pre-construction production estimates too optimistic? Yes, according to several contributions to the “Solar Risk Assessment: 2020” paper published by kWh Analytics. kWh found evidence of “an industry wide bias towards aggressive predictions,”...
Solar resource trends: Changing cloud-cover and AOD, and implications for PV yield
In recent years, we reported on lower-than-expected solar energy production in the Eastern U.S., corroborating PV plant owner observations using SolarAnywhere® insolation data. This prompted us to ask the questions: How does this recent weather activity compare to...
New York State solar incentive programs consolidated into NY-Sun
This month, under direction from the New York State Governor’s office, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and PSEG Long Island (now operating Long Island Power Authority’s electric system) merged their solar incentive programs under...
PowerClerk auto-document generation and electronic signature features streamline incentive and interconnection processing
Taking paper intensive processes online can dramatically simplify what formerly would have been manual, time-consuming administrative tasks. For the solar industry, this can help reduce soft costs, which today account for more than 60 percent of the cost of installing...
Infographic: Keeping Track of Solar
2013 saw record-breaking solar growth in the U.S.—an increase of 41% over 2012—and 2014 is expected to see even larger gains. With more than 440,000 solar electric systems operating across the U.S. today, keeping track of these distributed resources is more important...
CSI program wind-down doesn’t mean the end of solar in California
As the California Solar Initiative General Market program—the largest PV incentive program in the U.S.—winds down, an interesting solar landscape is emerging in California. A number of incentive programs large and small continue to support solar adoption in the state,...
Three ways automation can smash solar interconnection costs
It’s no secret that although solar hardware costs have been steadily decreasing, solar soft costs— including permitting, interconnection, customer acquisition and installation labor—have remained steady. In fact, according to studies by the National Renewable Energy...
California Solar Initiative at 85% of MW goal (and how we helped them get there)
It’s a remarkable achievement that in just seven years, the California Solar Initiative (CSI) has reported an estimated 1,629 megawatts (MW) of solar PV has been committed. That is a whopping 85% of its goal to install 1,940 MW of solar by the end of 2016 in...
Georgia blazing new trails with its value-based FiT
California and New Jersey are known for solar policy innovation, while the states of the Southeast have tended to stay on the sidelines despite having abundant sunshine. Until now, that is. Georgia is quickly emerging as a solar power innovator. Over the past 12...
Four ways that auto-communications save incentive administrators time and money
Imagine how much time it would take to send 1,000 personalized emails or letters, each one referencing multiple parties, unique technical information such as PV system equipment and capacity, and important economic information such as incentive amount. Performed...
USC 2013 insights: illuminating key utility solar issues
The Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA) Utility Solar Conference (USC) was held last month in Portland, Ore. This was convenient for our Kirkland, Wash., software team, so we sent four people down to join Tom Hoff from our Napa, Calif., office at the event. It was...
Hot topics at Intersolar NA 2015: ITC, solar + storage and snow!
San Francisco once again played host to the Intersolar North America conference in July. For industry veterans, this year’s event was familiar: crowded registration lines, bumping into old friends and a busy exhibition floor. On the other hand, this year’s hot...
Valuation of solar plus storage in Hawaii
Clean Power Research recently took on the challenge of developing a new methodology for performing a hybrid solar plus storage (solar + storage) valuation study for systems in Hawaii. The methodology was commissioned by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, Inc....
Five to thrive: Key characteristics of great utility customer engagement
"The utilities that succeed in educating their residential customers may be [the best positioned not only] to survive, but [also to] thrive in the new customer-centric electricity landscape that is now taking shape." – 2015 Utility Residential Customer Education...
Lessons from SEPA’s Utility Solar Conference Part 2: Stop worrying about rooftop solar (start focusing on opportunities)
For all the talk of utility death spirals, a single graph from GTM Research’s Shayle Kann, presented at the recent Solar Electric Power Association’s (SEPA) annual Utility Solar Conference (USC), should give U.S. utilities significant comfort that residential solar...
Lessons from SEPA’s Utility Solar Conference Part 1: Get electric rates right to fill the belly of the duck
The Solar Electric Power Association’s (SEPA) annual Utility Solar Conference (USC) is the premier utility solar conference in the United States, and the in-depth discussions between utility and industry leaders can be counted on to portend where solar is heading. At...
Connecting 150,000 solar customers to PG&E’s electric grid
This week, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) announced a major milestone: connection of 150,000 solar customers to their electric grid. This achievement is the result of PG&E’s long commitment to supporting their customers going solar, and comes with some...
Our top 3 in 2014
In 2014, we covered a wide range of topics on the Clean Power Research blog, from the differences between solar resource datasets, to deep dives into value of solar calculations. The top three posts of the year followed suit, reflecting interest in topics that address...
U.S. solar trends: 2015 edition
As everyone recovers from their New Year’s Eve festivities, shakes off the cobwebs and gets back to work, it’s time for our annual look at trends and predictions for the coming year. Who knows if we’ll be right, but it’s always fun to prognosticate. Here are the three...
Is it rational for the value of solar to exceed existing average retail electricity rates?
The utility and solar industries are in a heated debate about how to compensate customers who have distributed photovoltaic (PV) energy systems on their homes. Net energy metering (NEM) is currently the predominant approach used in the U.S. However, to understand any...
MN Solar Pathways: Illuminating pathways to 10% solar
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...
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...
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PowerClerk®: The proven solution for more than one million DER applications
The past two years have seen key milestones for distributed energy resource (DER) adoption in the U.S., including: Passing one million total residential solar installations in 2017. All solar generation (including residential, commercial and utility scale) in 2018...
Make the most of your DER interconnection data: virtual metering
In a previous blog post, we detailed the responsibility of distributed energy resource (DER) interconnection managers to capture DER system specifications for their system planners and distribution engineers. Since then, even more U.S. utilities have turned to...
Curtailment of low-cost renewables a cost-effective alternative to ‘seasonal’ energy storage
Last month, Utility Dive highlighted one of the major findings from our recent Minnesota Solar Pathways work: Minnesota study finds it cheaper to curtail solar than to add storage. In this article, we explain how some curtailment of low-cost renewables such as solar...
Higher-resolution data and broader geographic access with new SolarAnywhere Data license options
Thanks to our subscribers, partners and hard-working development team, SolarAnywhere® has become the most trusted and vetted solar resource dataset available. In 2017 alone, the SolarAnywhere team: Topped an EPRI study for forecasting Spotted a calibration issue at...
The future of solar forecasting with the new GOES-16 satellite
The SolarAnywhere® team transforms satellite images into industry-leading solar irradiance data. We make algorithms, not satellites, so when NOAA/NASA upgrades the hardware, we take notice of the possibilities—and get to work. On January 2, 2018 we made a seamless...
Why WattPlan Grid: Planning for DER adoption
Eight months ago, Clean Power Research and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) formed a unique partnership to solve the critical challenge of planning for DER adoption. In the words of our partners at SMUD, this new DER planning software—called WattPlan®...
SolarAnywhere FleetView Forecasts Top EPRI Study
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) recently completed a solar forecasting trial designed to help utilities understand the value that accurate solar prediction can bring to their energy market schedules and balancing operations. SolarAnywhere® FleetView®...
The August 21st solar eclipse: How and where it’ll impact solar production
On August 21, 2017, the U.S. will experience a solar eclipse for the first time since May 2012. The eclipse will cause an obscuration of the sun’s light, resulting in a reduction of the energy from irradiance that will hit the Earth’s surface. As the eclipse crosses...
How Orange and Rockland Utilities reduced interconnection application errors by 95%
PowerClerk: The DER interconnection control center In September 2016, we released an important new integration capability that enables utilities to use PowerClerk® to create their own distributed energy resource (DER) interconnection control center. By using web...