inputssolar

Inputssolar is an open-source software platform and data specification designed to aggregate, normalize, and serve inputs used in solar energy forecasting and analytics. It provides a uniform data model and a set of adapters to ingest information from weather stations, satellite irradiance estimates, and photovoltaic inverters, then stores and exposes the data through APIs and queryable storage.

Origin and development: The project emerged from a collaboration among researchers and industry partners in the early 2020s to address fragmentation in solar data. The first public release appeared in 2021, with subsequent major updates adding new adapters, data quality workflows, and compatibility with common time-series databases.

Architecture and features: The core includes a modular data model with fields for timestamp, location, solar irradiance components (GHI, DNI, DHI), meteorological variables, and PV system metadata such as tilt, orientation, and capacity. Data quality checks flag gaps, outliers, and mismatches. Ingestion pipelines support batch and streaming modes. The platform offers RESTful and GraphQL APIs, export in CSV/JSON/Parquet, and pluggable backends (SQL, NoSQL, object storage).

Applications: Utilities, researchers, and solar developers use inputssolar to build forecasts, monitor performance, conduct anomaly detection, and support capacity planning and energy trading. It also serves as a backbone for research datasets and reproducible experiments.

Community and impact: inputssolar is maintained by an open community. It emphasizes interoperability with other data ecosystems and provides documentation and tutorials to ease adoption.

See also: solar forecasting and time-series databases.