The information in this article is no longer relevant to our product offering, and POSTing of measurements for PV Tuning has now been decommissioned.
POSTing of PV measurements will only be relevant for users of the Solcast Super Rapid Update forecasting services (Enterprise clients only)
You can read more about this development in this article
When accurate solar forecasting is particularly important for you, automated sharing of your solar farm power output data to the Solcast API service could be a great fit for accomplishing your solar mission.
While its an option for you to provide us with a historical extract to enable our tuning technologies, this can be difficult for users who have many solar farm sites. It also limits the applicability of the PV tuning process when it is applied to older data.
Simply put, the most recent data is always best, when it comes to producing accurate forecasts. This is why we have enabled automated POSTing of solar farm power output data to our API service. You can schedule a regular update every week, every day, or as regularly as every 15-30 seconds (for super rapid update forecasting customers).
Setup Automated POSTing of Solar Farm Power Output Data to our API
If you have decided that routine and automatic POSTing of power output data to our API is the best option for you, the next step is to program an automated computer code script which can send this data to our API directly. This can be done using the following guidelines:
POSTing must be done using JSON format and must use a HTTP POST command to the correct resource ID.
Power output data can be provided using the 'measurement' or 'measurements' fields ('measurements' is used for POSTing more than one interval of data), and should be provide as averages of power output in MW, as calculated to the end of the averaging period.
You must use UTC timestamps to the ISO8601 standard. And should timestamp the 'period_end' field to the UTC time of the end of the period.
The average 'period' is in ISO8601 standard for a time duration. For example, 'PT5M' is a 5 minute duration.
The 'availability' field a 0-100 % value representing how much of the solar farm is currently online (*optional*, we use this to handle partial outages for maintenance or constraint periods).
Example JSON POST: Individual Measurement:
POST /utility_scale_sites/1234-abcd-1234-abcd/measurements
{
"measurement": {
"period_end": "2018-02-02T03:30:00Z",
"availability": 100,
"period": "PT5M",
"total_power": 1.23456
}
}Example JSON POST: Bulk Measurements:
{
"measurements": [{
"period_end": "2018-01-02T00:10:00Z",
"period": "PT10M",
"total_power": 12
}, {
"period_end": "2018-01-02T00:20:00Z",
"period": "PT10M",
"total_power": 12
}, {
"period_end": "2018-01-02T00:30:00Z",
"period": "PT10M",
"total_power": 12
}
]
}An example of sending a measurement to a utility scale site with cURL would be.
curl -X POST \
https://api.solcast.com.au/utility_scale_sites/abcd-1234-abcd-1234/measurements \
-H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
"measurement": {
"period_end": "2018-01-01T02:30:00Z",
"period": "PT5M",
"total_power": 123.45
}
}
Where YOUR_API_KEY is substituted for your API key available from your accounts page once you're logged in.
Need more help?
If the above information hasn't answer your question, please contact us via the chat bubble at right & we'll reply as soon as we can! --->
You can also consult our documentation or send us an email