Energy Stats app Integration with Solcast

[BarryC]

Hello,

has anyone else found that the solcast daily limit of 10 API calls seems to get used up much quicker after Fox changed their API? I looked at the solar forecast one yesterday from Energy Stats, when I looked at it again today (more than 24 hours later) I get the "You have exceeded your free daily limit". Very frustrating

[Will]

Yes the new limits have impacted a few people. Recommended you pay for a paid account now with better API limits.

[TonyDurrant]

I suspect that the stats from Solcast do not change very often during the day, so rather than read then every time the user looks at the Summary tab, couldn't the data be retained in the App, and only refreshed from Solcast if it is more than (for example) 2 hours old?

[alpriest]

I'm very late to respond but wanted to confirm that Energy Stats caches your Solcast result for 8 hours, so if you have 2 sites (e.g. front & rear) and visit the summary tab often the most requests you'd use is 6 per day. You can force a refresh of the Solcast data from the bottom of the Summary page.

There was a bug about 6 months ago however which Solcast informed me of whereby the Android app would repeatedly request from Solcast if the first request failed (e.g. free requests had been exhausted). This was fixe.

There are changes coming soon to overlay the Solcast data on the parameters page too so you can compare prediction against your actual PV generated.

[spiral]

There are changes coming soon to overlay the Solcast data on the parameters page too so you can compare prediction against your actual PV generated.

I know this is an old thread but I was somewhat confused by the comparison between generated and predicted in that the comparison was quite high (even exceeding several 100% sometimes). I have now concluded that the comparative data must take that point in time to compare against. e.g. If it predicts 25KW for the day and in the first 30 mins you produce 2.5 I was expecting to see 10% of expected generation. What appears to happen is it compares this figure against what it expects you to generate in the first 30 mins so if it was only expecting 2KW you see 125%.
You therefore get a rolling comparison throughout the day.
I can't fathom the battery predictions though.

[alpriest]

The percentage at the top of the Power Flow screen is calculated as below. However if your Solcast data doesn't cover the full day (or was incorrect) then you could have generated more than expected. You can look on the Parameters tab to see the Solar estimates and you should be able to see.

Code: Select all

totalGeneration / todaySolarForecast

The battery estimates are the time to either full or empty assuming the battery charge/discharge rate were to remain constant. This is then rounded to hours/days.