RELEASE 11.09.0 - PlantPredict

August 17th, 2023 Albedo values in your weather file can be used in your prediction You can now import weather files with Albedo included into your PlantPredict Weather Library. Weather data providers have started including Albedo in their TMY/TGY and Timeseries weather files. Having this data as a time series (hourly or sub-hourly) will make the prediction more accurate than using a monthly averages. This is also helpful for our users that are using PlantPredict to model an operating asset with measured data. During the weather file upload process, when you get the the Format Data page, you will now see an option under the Variables section for Albedo. In the below screenshot, you will see that it is mapped to column 9 of my file.

On the Environmental Conditions page of your prediction, you can specify if you want the prediction to use the weather file provided albedo values or the monthly average values with the toggle switch highlighted below.

Download your PlantPredict MapBuilder Layouts as a SHP File Due to customer demand, we have added support for downloading your PlantPredict MapBuilder Layouts as a .SHP file. This is just one more way that PlantPredict is compatible with industry standard tools. Now our PlantPredict Subscribers can take their MapBuilder Layouts and import them into GIS tools such as ArcGIS or QGIS. Simply click the Download Data link in the MapBuilder screen and select SHP (ESRI Shape File), then click the Export button.

This will download a .ZIP file that will contain all the .shp, .dbf and .prj files that are needed to open this layout in your GIS toolset. We are including all available layers in the download package, so you will get your layout, boundaries, constraints and any topographical analysis layers that have been generated. Duplicate Constraints with the click of a button If you are designing a rooftop system or a utility scale system around wind turbines, you might want to create a constraint shape and then copy and paste it over and over again. We have implemented this capability into the PlantPredict Mapbuilder tool. Draw the constraint shape that you want to copy, and then click the “Duplicate” icon in the right hand tool tray. This will copy and paste a duplicate version of the selected constraint. In the middle of the constraint will be a small circle that you can click and drag to move the new constraint into the needed location.

Bug Fixes We used this past sprint to address several bugs that have been reported by our user community. Here is a listing with a short description of each In a recent release, we broke the Module Azimuth field in our MapBuilder tool. When you would adjust the Azimuth, Updating the DC Capacity would reset the Azimuth back to 180. This has been fixed. Within the System Details of a Prediction, you can establish a Plant Output Limit. Users had reported that they would turn ON the Plant Output Limit and leave the System Details, then notice when they went back into the System Details page the Plant Output Limit would be turned OFF. We fixed is so that the Plant Output Limit toggle switch is saving correctly now.

This is a minor improvement on the functionality we implemented in Release 11.8.1. PlantPredict was doing the certain validations on the Quality Check page, which would require users to go back to the prior page to fix. We moved those validation checks to the button click that moves users to the Quality check page to make this work better. We also improved the Quality Check page when uploading POAI data, so that the chart defaults to showing POAI instead of GHI. Users had reported that they were getting errors related to Seasonal Tilt validation despite the fact that they were not using Seasonal Tilt as their Tracker Logic. We fixed this and made the error message more user friendly if there are any true Seasonal Tilt validation errors. When creating a new module using the “From Datasheet” option, the “Heat Absorption Coefficient Alpha T” was being set to 0. We have updated this to make it 0.9.

Release Notes