Accuracy of Solar Forecasts
One thing I noticed from working in the weather forecasting industry for the past ten years is that customers tend to focus on forecast accuracy, but most vendors will spend their time talking about features (whilst only making general claims of accuracy).
In my role as CEO of Solcast, I've been directing my team to think more like the customer, and as a result, Solcast has been working to make the accuracy of its solar power forecasting highly visible. We are now storing our 1-hour ahead forecasts for everywhere in the world, and making them available to our customers & users in real time.
The below is an example is for the past week at the Broken Hill Solar Farm in NSW, Australia. You'll note the measured 'Actuals' from this 50MW solar farm site, our Estimated Actuals actuals and the 1-hour ahead forecast appear on one graph. This 'accuracy' graph is maintained for each and every one of our rooftop and utility scale solar farm sites in the API.
Once you get started with the Solcast API service, and create your free rooftop, utility scale or weather (solar radiation) site, you'll have access our accuracy reporting graphs so that you can easily track the Solcast forecast performance.
James Luffman
James is a former operational meteorologist, and has worked as a senior manager in the weather industry. James has designed, built and operated real-time modelling systems for industrial applications, bringing key expertise to the deployment of our operational products and services.
James sees the integration of increasing solar and storage as a singularly critical technology challenge of the next 10 years.