Frequently Asked Questions
How do your solar energy forecasts help solar farm operators?
If you’re running a solar farm, you likely need to bid some percentage of your farm’s generation capacity into an energy market. More accurate short-term forecasts enable you to bid more accurately, ensuring that less energy is wasted, and significantly reducing penalties for under-supply (such as FPP in Australia). We also help you to avoid having to procure expensive grid firming services, and if you have a co-located battery, our forecasts will enable you to maximise your system’s profitability.
What’s different about your forecasts?
Using a combination of artificial intelligence and cloud motion vectors, we examine real-time satellite images and forecast how clouds will form and move in the next 2-3 hours. Each artificial intelligence model is trained specifically on the region of interest. This is important, since local factors such as coastlines, hills, or mountains can affect cloud formation. The resulting solar generation forecasts are more accurate than global irradiation models used by most solar forecast providers.
Since we rely on satellite imagery and weather data, there is no need for costly installation and maintenance of any hardware. We can deploy our forecasts quickly, in almost any global location.
Our forecasts have a higher resolution, both geospatially and temporally, than any other forecast provider that we know of.
For longer horizons, such as 24h ahead, we create an optimal blend with weather-based models.
How do you help virtual power plants?
Virtual power plants (VPPs) usually consist of fleets of rooftop solar PV and energy storage systems. We can provide forecasts to VPP operators that are site-specific, postcode-specific, or region-specific, depending on the operator’s needs. We can learn the unique profile of every individual system using only a small amount of historical data. This enables us to provide valuable system diagnosis information, or alerts when a system is underperforming. We can also determine how much generation is lost due to curtailment, enabling VPP operators to accurately assess the profitability of different control strategies.
How do you help energy traders?
Solar energy is becoming a significant part of the energy generation mix in many global regions (and continues to be the fastest growing form of electricity generation). As a result, solar volatility is having an increasing impact on energy market dynamics. On the one hand, large volumes of solar generation in the middle of the day can lead to extended negative price intervals. On the other hand, sudden cloud events passing over solar-dense regions can lead to sudden, massive supply shortfalls, resulting in price spikes.
We can provide solar generation forecasts of all solar PV – both utility-scale and rooftop – across extended regions – helping energy traders to reduce their risk and maximise trading profit.
What kind of consulting do you do?
We have an extensive background in providing state-of-the-art solutions to the energy sector.
Every region is different and may have different needs and incentives when it comes to analysing and understanding solar generation or other large sources of data (such as smart meter data).
Our PhD-qualified team can assist with applying state-of-the-art machine learning and artificial intelligence methods to industry problems to help our clients reduce their costs and increase revenue.