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Collecting Solar Data
Solar data come from the Wind Integration National Dataset (WIND) Toolkit and the National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
It consists of a 50-TB subset containing 1-hour resolution data for 7 years on a uniform 2-km grid that covers the continental U.S., the Baja Peninsula, and parts of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The entire gridded atmospheric WIND toolkit is available through an API. Detailed examples and convenience functions for working with the NREL WIND Toolkit are provided here in the form of jupyter notebooks. In addition, the ga_wind_demo.ipyb notebook illustrates how the data can be queried.
The WIND Toolkit has been used for the Texas interconnection studies. Unfortunately, only data for the years 2007 through 2013 (included) are available. For this reason, the NSRDB is used for the western interconnect studies, which focus on year 2016.
It is a serially complete collection of meteorological and solar irradiance data sets for the United States and a growing list of international locations. NSRDB uses a physics-based modeling (PSM: Physical Solar Model) approach to provide solar radiation data for the entire United States in gridded segments (4 km x 4 km) using geostationary satellites. Data can be accessed via an API. This procedure has been used to collect the 2016 irradiance data.