This page shows daily plots of forecast grid data for solar photovoltaic energy in Belgium, year 2016. We use quarter hour forecast data from Elia, which is corrected with up-scaled measurement data for the monitored capacity. The monitored capacity can deviate from the installed capacity; and it can change over time. Therefore values normalized to kWh/day per kWpeak, and also hourly fluctuations are provided. In general grid forecast data is more accurate than weather re-analysis from satellite data.

solar	2016	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
Monitored capacity (GWpeak)	2.95	2.95	2.95	2.95	2.95	2.95	2.95	2.95	2.95	2.95	2.95	2.95	2.95
Cumulative energy (GWh)	2926	73.1	208	444	769	1179	1512	1919	2299	2608	2779	2861	2926
Monthly energy (GWh)	2926	73.1	135	236	325	411	332	407	380	309	171	82.1	64.5
Normalized cumulative sum (kWh/kWpeak)	991	24.7	70.5	150	260	399	512	650	778	883	941	969	991
Normalized monthly energy (kWh/kWpeak)	991	24.7	45.7	79.8	110	139	113	138	129	105	57.9	27.8	21.8
Normalized cumulative distribution [%]	100 %	2.5 %	7.11 %	15.2 %	26.3 %	40.3 %	51.7 %	65.6 %	78.6 %	89.1 %	95.0 %	97.8 %	100 %
Normalized monthly distribution [%]	100 %	2.5 %	4.61 %	8.06 %	11.1 %	14.0 %	11.4 %	13.9 %	13.0 %	10.6 %	5.85 %	2.81 %	2.2 %
Capacity factor [%]	11.3 %	3.33 %	6.57 %	10.7 %	15.3 %	18.7 %	15.6 %	18.5 %	17.3 %	14.5 %	7.77 %	3.86 %	2.93 %

Average hourly data:
The plots below show hourly data, normalized to kiloWatt per installed capacity expressed in kiloWatt peak. The Elia grid data contains four data points per hour, these are averaged to represent a single hour on the plot. So the hour 14 combines data points from 14:00, 14:15, 14:30 and 14:45 for example. In the legend we display the avarage daily generated energy in kWhpeak per month. The maximum achievable energy per day is 24 kWh per kWpeak of installed capacity, since there are 24 hours in a day. Fluctuations are summarized with boxplots for the entire year and per month.

Acknowledgement: many thanks to Elia for open access to solar grid data of Belgium at www.elia.be/en/grid-data. This data is licensed under the Elia Open Data License, which uses the CC BY-4.0 public license, and is governed by Belgian law.

User guide: most of the figures on this page are dynamic boxplots. A png image can be downloaded with the pop-up window at the right upper side. These functions require that javascript is enabled. Boxplots are explained here.