Data Sources

Curtailments Data

The CAISO publishes daily reports of curtailed solar and load at 5-minute increments. A massive simplifying assumption was to treat the load data as we would a dayahead load forecast. Curtailment events were classified based on the amount of solar production curtailed relative to the entire day’s worth of production.

Exploration

Historic Weather Forecasts

Historic forecasts from the Global Forecast System were extracted from the NOAA. A dayahead forecast at 1° spatial resolution at 3-hour intervals were used for this study. Extracting historic weather forecasts represented a significant amount of data engineering work in this project. Two features of importance were taken from the dayahead weather forecasts - Temperature and downward shortwave radiation.

CA County Boundaries

Geographic data from California’s open data portal were used to subset global

CEC Powerplant Locations

Powerplant locations were used to weight weather features by the installed solar capacity in each county.