The Importance of Data Quality for Reducing the Uncertainty of Site-Adapted Solar Resource Datasets

In a 2016 study, Clean Power Research presented a statistically sound methodology for quantifying the uncertainty of satellite-derived solar resource datasets adapted to ground-measured data. Since that time, Clean Power Research has made numerous improvements to SolarAnywhere® data and reference data quality control (QC) procedures. Using the same methodology and site-adaptation procedure as the original study, we demonstrate a 40% reduction in the uncertainty of site-adapted solar resource data in North America. 83% of the reduction is attributable to the increased temporal consistency of Solar Anywhere V3.6 relative to prior versions. The remaining reduction in uncertainty (17%) is due to improved data QC. Together, the results demonstrate how using high-quality datasets reduces the uncertainty of site-adapted solar resource data.