Primary Uses
- Manage your portfolio of projects
- Allocate project funding
- Identify equipment and maintenance issues
- Maximize solar production
- Restructure long-term PPAs and financial agreements
Solar Performance Reconciliation helps you manage your pipeline of proposed sites, diversify your portfolio of assets, and make sure existing projects are operating at optimum levels. Each month 3TIER delivers an updated solar irradiance time series at either a single project or across your entire portfolio of locations. Time series easily integrate into your own internal processes and are based on our updated global solar dataset, which includes over 13 years of hourly solar values.
Once a project is built, it is critical to monitor how it is performing compared to initial projections to assess loan risk. If there are cases of underperformance, are they caused by weather, ongoing equipment issues, or a simple lack of maintenance? Recognizing and resolving underperformance issues as early as possible helps maximize energy production, optimize operations, and proactively restructure financial and capacity obligations.
What if you had over a decade of data at all of your development sites? In the assessment phase, Solar Performance Reconciliation enables you to know earlier which sites are most promising and regularly evaluate and re-prioritize your entire portfolio of projects. Make informed decisions about capital deployment, equipment choices, and project priorities based on scientifically derived data at near real-time.
Unless optional features are requested, solar resource information is delivered for each location via a data file in an easily integrated CSV file format.
3TIER produced the first global solar irradiance map and time-series dataset at roughly three times the resolution of previous US solar datasets and at thirty times the resolution of global datasets available from NASA. Based on over a decade of satellite imagery and cutting-edge technology, our uniform methodology is supported by a large scientific and research community.
The dataset is based on actual, half-hourly, high-resolution visible satellite imagery observations via the broadband visible wavelength channel at a 2 arc minute resolution. These data have been processed to hourly GHI, DNI, and DIF values. 3TIER processes the satellite images based on a combination of in-house research and algorithms published in peer-reviewed scientific literature. These algorithms contain parameters and coefficients that are based on empirical fits to observational data. The specific satellites and length of time varies slightly by region due to differences in the availability of data from region to region. See the chart below for more details.
| Regions | Satellites | Temporal Coverage |
| Western Hemisphere | GOES 8 - 13 |
15 years (January 1997 - present) |
| South Asia & Middle East | Meteosat 5, Meteosat 7 |
13 years (January 1999 – last quarter) |
| East Asia & Oceania | GMS 5, GOES 9, MTSAT 1-2 |
13 years (December 1998 – present) |
| Europe & Africa | Meteosat 7, Meteosat 9 |
15 years (July 1998 – last quarter) |
If you are unfamiliar with the technical terminology on this page, please visit our Glossary for more information.
