PV Generation Forecast - Customised for your site.
"Do I put the washing machine on today, or will it be better to wait?" - yes, it sounds a strange question to many, but it's becoming a common question in households with PV microgeneration looking to reduce their reliance on imported electricity and therefore make saving on their bills.
The question of generation forecasting is regularly raised on various websites and internet forums, but there seems to be very little insight into what forecasting tools are available to those with microgeneration systems, the majority of what's out there seems to gravitate towards paid services for commercial operators, however, information is available.
Around six or seven years ago I came across a PV generation forecast offered by the weather forecast operations at Meteoblue under the name 'Pointsolar' and used to be available at 'http://www.meteoblue.com/apps/pointsolar' which, through proving useful, was used regularly. The system was simple to use, feed in your location details, the system nominal capacity (kWp), orientation and slope of the roof and hey presto, you have a graphical generation forecast for your own system covering the next 6 days. Bookmark the forecast URL to your browser favourites and that was it, job done, no need to input the variables every time you want to see the forecast, just select the bookmark. The solution worked well for a number of years, then the dreaded 404 (Page not found) error appeared and the non-commercial offering seemed to have disappeared.
It took a little time to find, but access to the site was found to have moved to the German solar information portal 'SolarServer' at the following address -
The 6 day generation forecast output for any given location will look similar to the chart below, which represents an example 4kWp system with a SW aspect and is predicted to have some reasonable generation over the next few days.
If looking to embed the generated forecast charts into a webpage or blog, be aware that the degree of location accuracy available could be used to identify your home address if published. Also note the Meteoblue conditions regarding the definition of private & commercial usage.
Source Acknowledgement & Links
SolarServer - http://www.solarserver.com/about-us.html
Meteoblue - https://content.meteoblue.com/en/about-us
