Objectives of the service
3E Project Development provides accurate and bankable satellite-based solar irradiation data for solar power modelling: 3E Solar Irradiation Data. It is your go-to application to assess the long-term yield of future solar assets, improve the return on investment and evaluate operational plant performance.
3E Solar Irradiation Data include:
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Historical timeseries: High-resolution satellite-based timeseries of solar irradiation data, available worldwide
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TMY: Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) based on 3E multi-year satellite-based solar irradiation timseries, available in Europe, Middle-East and Africa
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Exceedance probabilities: Exceedance probabilities (PXX) tailored to your needs, from P75 to P95, available in Europe, Middle-East and Africa
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API near real-time: Last 7 days to last 30 days to assess the performances of the assets, available worldwide
3E Solar Irradiation Data’s high accuracy creates value for all the stakeholders in the sector of photovoltaics, and the versatility of the data facilitates a wide range of use cases - from the design phase to the operational and transaction phase.
Users and their needs
Developers, lenders, and investors use accurate and bankable 3E Solar Irradiation Data to gain assurance when evaluating the feasibility, profitability, and risks of a project. If their assets underperform, a strict financial penalty may apply which requires expensive risk mitigation measures. Owners, asset managers, and operations and maintenance contractors use it to generate unambiguous key performance indicators during the operational phase for the efficient and profitable management of their portfolios. They resolve their daily struggle with solar data availability and quality issues, due to scarce on-site measurements or sensor quality issues - often related to calibration or maintenance.
Service/ system concept
3E Solar Irradiation Data irradiation and meteorological data tailored to the use in the sector of renewable energy.
In collaboration with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, geostationary weather satellites data from four services are translated into solar irradiation data using the most advanced Cloud Physical Properties (CPP) model available today. Parallax and sun corrections are applied to these data before parsing them in an in-house cloud-optimized data storage. Finally, specific physical models are applied to decompose the Global Horizontal Irradiance in its components, convert it to the plane-of-array, and applied the requested features. On top of these data, reanalysis and forecast weather datasets are ingested to provide the meteorological variables.
Space Added Value
Data from four geostationary weather satellite services are processed in our operational streams:
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0° service (historically called MSGPRIME), operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT)
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Indian Ocean Data Coverage (IODC) service, operated by EUMETSAT
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Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES)-east service, operated by the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
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HIMAWARI service, operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA)
It corresponds to our solution’s main input and is as such essential. These services provide consistent near real-time satellite data, at high temporal (every 10 or 15 minutes) and spatial (2 or 3 km) resolutions. Altogether, it covers almost the whole world.
Current Status
3E Project Development solution was launched end of 2022 (https://3e.eu/project-development). It provides 3E Solar Irradiation Data through different subscription plans, including a free trial access plan (https://3e.eu/project-development). The solution will be continuously improved along the project, by extending the data offer in terms of historical and spatial coverage and adding new features.
