PV_Forecast: About

The PV_Forecast service supplies forecasts of nationally- and regionally-aggregated electricity generation from solar Photovoltaics (PV) connected to the GB transmission network.

We currently run three tiers of PV_Forecast: Nationally-aggregated, regionally-aggregated by DNO License Area (a.k.a PES or GSP Group) and regionally-aggregated by Grid Supply Point (GSP).

The national forecast includes several updates per day whereas the regional forecasts are currently only updated once a day:

• The nationally aggregated PV forecast gives half hourly outturn estimates with regular updates:
• 01:00, 02:00, 03:00, 04:00, 05:00, 06:00, 10:00, 13:00, 16:00, 19:00, 22:00 each day
• Out to 72 hours
• 07:00 each day
• Out to 120 hours
• The regional forecast produces a half-hourly outturn estimate by GSP or by PES (a.k.a DNO License Area or GSP Group Region) with a single daily update:
• 07:00 each day
• Out to 72 hours

N.B. The times above are in UTC and refer to the NWP releases from our weather forecast provider, MeteoGroup. The corresponding PV forecasts are available ~1 hour later once we've trained and run our PV_Forecast model.

All of the operational and historical forecasts are accessible via a fully documented web API, and there's also a convenient PV_Forecast-API Python Library on GitHub to make accessing them easier (and another for accessing PV_Live historical outturn estimates).

PV_Forecast has been developed by Sheffield Solar, a research group based in the Physics & Astronomy department at The University of Sheffield, in collaboration with MeteoGroup and PassivSystems.