mySolarForecast

Retrieve Solar PV forecasts from Solcast and the Australia Solar Energy Forecast System (ASEFS).

Two Solar PV forecast sources are used for comparison purposes. The forecasts are recorded in InfluxDB.

Prerequisites

An AWS account. mySolarForecast is an AWS Lamdba function.

If this will be your only Lambda function, you will remain within the AWS Free Tier. There will be nominal charges (a few cents per month) for Amazon S3 and data transfers.

To deploy the AWS Lamdba function, the Serverless framework is used.

You will need to register with Solcast for an API key: https://solcast.com.au/api/register/

You will need an InfluxDB to stream metrics to.

Installation

1. Download or clone this repository to your local workstation.

Serverless Framework

2. To ease the setup and configuration of this Lamdba, Serverless is used to deploy the code and it's dependancies.

   On your local workstation, install serverless.

   npm install serverless
   

3. Setup your AWS Profile as per Serverless guidelines.

4. Edit serverless.yml and update the following custom values:

   influxdb_ip: "XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX"
   influxdb_port: XXXX
   influxdb_user: "XXXXXXXX"
   influxdb_password: "XXXXXXXX"
   influxdb_database: "XXXXXXXX"
   influxdb_ssl: "True or False"
   influxdb_verify_ssl: "False or True"
   influxdb_measurement: "XXXXXXXX"
   influxdb_location: "XXXXXXXX"
   long: -XX.XXXXXX
   lat: XXX.XXXXX
   solcast_api_key: "XXXXXXXX"
   # See Solcast Power API: https://solcast.com.au/api/docs/pv_power.html
   # Where each PV orientation is a tuple (azimuth, capacity). 
   # Example 1: 5K North facing system: [(0,5000)]
   # Example 2: 5K East and West: [(-90,2500),(90,2500)]
   pv_roof: "[(XXX,XXXX),(-XX,XXXX)]"
   

Deployment

5. Deploy mySolarForecast:

   From your local workstation, deploy mySolarForecast to AWS:

   serverless deploy 
   

Next Steps

Now that you are collecting the inverter's data, you'll want to ultimately display it in a dashboard as seen above.

mySolarForecast uses InfluxDB as a time series database to store the forecasts.

The following metrics are available:

• pv_solcast for tomorrow's Solcast's forecast.
• pv_solcast_today for the Solar forecast for the remainder of the day.
• pv_forecast for tomorrow's ASEFS's forecast.

To display the data in real time dashboard, you can use Grafana to pull the metrics from InfluxDB. You can either install your own Grafana server or use their free Grafana hosted solution.

Note, as the forecast is for tomorrow (24 hours from now), to retrieve today's forecast you can either time shift 24 hours back or retireve the remaining forecast values from InfluxDB metric: "pv_solcast_today".