Using Open-Source Forecasts for Solar Plant Maintenance Outage Scheduling Can Reduce Lost Energy

Solar plant operators have to schedule outages for periodic maintenance, where plants or subsets of plants are shut down. Outages can last many hours to several days and result in lost energy generation. Scheduling outages one or more days in advance may be required for staffing purposes and to provide adequate notification to grid operators. Because solar generation can vary from one day to the next, it is ideal for outage scheduling to be informed by the weather, with resulting generation that will or could occur on each day being considered for an outage. In this work, we demonstrate how forecasts made with open-source data and tools can improve maintenance outage scheduling relative to not using forecasts, reducing losses relative to perfect scheduling by more than half. Reference code to replicate this work, which is freely available, is also introduced.