Solar Insolation Calculations

[ianganderton]

Can use the NASA API to get the flat insolation with weather and then use the tilt calculations from the spreadsheet to adjust it?
The NASA data also had a "clear sky" index, possibly that's a factor you can just multiply by to get the average data with weather?

Yes I think that’s the plan. I need to do some comparisons first though to check to see if that theory will work

have you had a look at the spreadsheet? There are 2 hidden sheets that do most of the calculations. It’s pretty bloody complicated!!!

 

[svetz]

...have you had a look at the spreadsheet? ...

It's on my to-do list. One of the ideas for the monitoring s/w I wrote was to use the SAM calculations (you can get the source) to calculate the expected power to compare to the actual power to generate alerts if something was amiss...but it would have ended up being a monthly calculation. I ended up using a near-by solar irradiance meter to get daily data and it's been working well.... but I do want to look at it, nice working through the numbers to make sure you really understand something.