Sheffield PV Live Data

The PV Live service provided by Sheffield University provides access to near-real-time and historical estimates of PV generation on the GB transmission network.

Energy Sparks uses this data to get estimates of solar PV generation data where we don't have direct access to data from schools. The historical data is fetched daily via their v2 API.

The application is configured to fetch data from a number of "Solar PV Areas". These are areas of the UK we are interested in and are configured via the admin interface. We then fetch the data from the nearest available source for each of those locations.

The readings are half-hourly, giving 48 readings per day.

If readings are missing (i.e. there are fewer than the expected number of day readings for each year) then a further job backfills the data.

The backfilling is done for the last 4 years, and will insert new readings in the database, or update any existing readings for the given date.

The Solar PV areas have longitudes and latitudes associated with them, which are used to fetch the appropriate PV data. If the coordinates of the area are changed, the data is NOT automatically reset - there needs to be a manual process to either run the backfill process, or delete the old data (which will cause the backfill to run).