Beyond looking at annual data, understanding solar irradiation seasonality is important for choosing the right technology for your PV project.
To see differences over the year, Prospect provides averaged irradiance values for each month. These values are derived from globally validated Solargis satellite models.
With Prospect's 24x12 daily profiles, you'll see how solar irradiation averages change depending on the time of the day.
Understand the expected average working conditions of the power plant to estimate related thermal, spectral, and snow losses, as well as other effects of the environment on the energy conversion.
Besides solar irradiation parameters, Prospect gives you averaged hourly temperature and monthly values for wind, humidity, precipitation, snow, and others.
To accurately calculate the reflected solar irradiance, you need site-specific averaged monthly albedo data. This is especially important for bifacial modules.
Surface slope, azimuth, and horizon data are available in Prospect as well.
You want to know these values for improved incident irradiance and far shading loss calculations. We use digital surface models to help identify local features and their effect on solar energy at the pre-feasibility stage when detailed site information is not available.
Besides in-app data visualizations and summary reports, you can download solar irradiance and meteo data in CSV format. The format is especially useful if you want to import the data into other energy simulation tools.
Prospect updates and recalculates yield values automatically after each additional year of data is collected. To help you work with the most representative averages every time a new year is complete, we automatically add it to the app.
You can also keep the calculations done using older data and recalculate using updated data any time you want.
During the site prospection, you can visualize solar irradiation maps in high resolution: global irradiation, direct irradiation, diffuse to global fraction, and irradiation seasonality.
Thanks to energy conversion algorithms, we have also created global tilted irritation and expected energy yield maps.
As a Prospect user, you can explore the site's meteorological conditions by switching between air temperature, lowest expected operating temperature, wind speed, precipitation (rainfall), snow days, relative humidity, and precipitable water data layers.
Access map visualizations of important local data: ground albedo, land cover, elevation, terrain slope, and azimuth.
Besides, other factors related to energy demand provide additional contextual information for your energy projects, e.g. population density, cooling, and heating degree days. To help with local explorations, maps including topographic names and satellite views are also included.
The Prospect's map interface allows for measuring the distance between sites and calculating areas by simply drawing them on the map without needing any additional GIS tool.
By pinning your project on the Prospect's map, you will have quick access to all project details and the option to share the location with other team members.
Run simulations for ground-mounted PV systems for any azimuth and tilt.
Prospect’s simulation engine can also simulate energy yield for the most common tracking systems.
Prospect can simulate PV systems taking into account specific characteristics of rooftop PV installed on flat or inclined roofs (or even vertically oriented systems).
Calculate the expected yield for floating PV systems thanks to our specific simulation model.
Using the most common settings users can save time and generate results faster. Besides, this feature makes it simple to retrieve results even for those without an engineering background.
Users can predefine their preferred PV system with some specific details so that they save time and foster the consistency of solar projects across their portfolio.
Prospect facilitates exporting any project configuration in CSV format. This is useful for using the same settings in a Solargis API call at a later stage. It is also a simple way to share your project configuration with other team members and stakeholders.
Prospect integrates all the insights to help you better analyze project opportunities.
This includes expected energy yield during the PV plant’s lifetime together with an overview of solar irradiation and climatic conditions for the specific project location.
Prospect calculates the expected energy using the Solargis simulation engine.
As a result, you will get tables and charts visualizing the expected energy generation and performance ratios for each year of the PV plant’s lifetime.
With 24x12 daily profiles provided in Prospect, you will know how energy averages change depending on the time of the day.
This is especially useful for projects where meeting certain demand requirements is important.
Prospect provides an overview of site-specific environmental conditions in a comprehensive summary of long-term averages of irradiance and other key parameters.
This allows for further calculation of related thermal losses (temperature, wind), spectral losses (humidity, precipitable water), soiling losses (precipitation rates), and snow losses (snow days).
For the estimation of reflected irradiation from the ground surface, ground albedo values are also included.
Terrain data and sun path diagrams will help you understand how the sun's position and surrounding mountains impact the energy received by the system throughout the year.
Check energy losses across the whole energy conversion process.
For the calculation, the software considers all steps on the energy conversion chain: far shading, soiling, snow, angular reflectivity, spectral loss, module’s PV conversion, inter-row shading, module’s power tolerance, inverter efficiency, and electrical losses related to mismatch, cabling, and other losses on the AC side of the system.
Generate, download, and share reports in PDF and XLSX formats.
You can choose your preferred unit configuration and language (more than 15 are available) and keep track of all the generated reports for each of your solar energy projects.
Solargis Prospect allows users to work on their preferred geographical and physical units e.g. solar radiation, temperature, latitude and longitude, and terrain. For numbers shown in the finance section, users can also choose from the most popular currency units.
Prospect calculates the expected project revenue for the entire power plant’s lifetime.
Prospect's finance calculator allows inserting main PV system costs for both installation and regular operations.
Besides your inputs on the price of electricity, Prospect takes into account also tax rates and debt ratio when calculating project finances.
During the prospection phase, it's natural that you want to compare several project options. Prospect's comparison feature instantly shows yield and climate conditions for multiple projects at the same time, without the need to extract or import any data.
Prospect not only helps save time on data collection and energy calculation tasks. It also helps keep all user's projects organized with additional features for naming, adding labels, and archiving projects.
To facilitate working across team members, users can change the ownership of the project to other users that are included in the same company subscription.
