How to Connect Solcast to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Solcast

You have an Excel workbook full of site coordinates, capacity figures, and configuration parameters — the raw material for energy yield models, asset registries, and insurance submissions. Solcast stores the irradiance actuals and the PV site records that turn those coordinates into bankable numbers. Getting the two to talk is the gap that costs people their afternoons.

Solcast is good at delivering high-resolution solar resource data and managing the configuration of PV power sites at scale. But moving that data into a workbook — or pushing new site records from Excel into Solcast — requires API calls that most analysts and portfolio managers aren't positioned to make themselves. The usual flow is to export a CSV from whatever reporting view Solcast exposes, import it into Excel, reformat the columns to match the model, and repeat the sequence every time the model needs fresh data.

Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual CSV Export

The default for Excel. You open Solcast, request whatever data you need, export the CSV, and import it into Excel — then reformat the columns, fix the date format, and delete the rows that don't belong to your sites. For a single-site pull, that sequence takes maybe ten minutes.

For a portfolio of 35 sites, with a 12-month irradiance history per site, that's a lot of ten-minute sequences stacked end to end. Each one carries its own risk of importing into the wrong worksheet, getting the date column delimiter wrong, or overwriting last month's data. The model sitting downstream of the data doesn't care about any of that — it just needs the right numbers in the right cells.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has Solcast connection options. You can set up a scheduled flow that queries the Solcast API and writes results back into an Excel worksheet stored in SharePoint or OneDrive.

Before you go further: do you know how to configure an HTTP request action in Power Automate? What the Solcast historical irradiance endpoint expects in its request body? How to parse the array of daily records that comes back and map each field to the right column? If any of that is murky, this path is going to eat more hours than it saves. Skip to Method 3 or 4.

Still here? The flow works once it's built. Scheduled trigger, HTTP action against the Solcast API, Parse JSON, Apply to Each to write rows into the Excel table.

But one-trigger-one-site is not a portfolio pull.

Running a 20-site query means 20 Apply to Each loops, and when site 14 has a stale resource ID that returns a 422, the flow logs the error in a way that takes twenty minutes to trace.

You probably just need the irradiance data in the workbook so the energy model can run. You probably have no idea how to configure a Power Automate HTTP action with the right Solcast auth headers — and that's completely reasonable. So you hand it off to the IT person who handles integrations, and now the project is blocked on their queue.

Once you need to join irradiance results against a capacity table in a second worksheet, or filter to only sites with loss_factor above a threshold, you've left Power Automate's native capabilities behind entirely.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for repeatable workbook ↔ Solcast workflows was a category of add-ons that let you manually configure column mappings and saved templates. You picked your range, tagged the fields, saved a config, and ran it.

That was a real step up from CSV imports. The output was consistent, configs were reusable, the team didn't have to redo the column formatting on every run.

But you were still responsible for the template design, the field mapping, the date range logic, the conditional logic about which sites to include. The tool got the data through, but the thinking was still on you. And the moment a site was renamed in Solcast, or a new field appeared in the API response, your config broke until someone went back in and fixed it.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you are looking at, and through its built-in Solcast integration it can pull irradiance data, query site inventories, register new resources, and write results back — for you. No template configuration, no automation glue, no summarizing your data by hand. You just ask.

Example 1: Pull a full year of irradiance data for a specific site

For the single site at latitude 36.7213, longitude -4.4214, fetch historical irradiance and weather data for the full year 2025 from Solcast and write date, ghi, dni, dhi, air_temp, and wind_speed_10m into columns A–F of this Excel sheet

Every day in the year, every field, landing in the right columns — one prompt.

Example 2: Export the full PV site inventory sorted by capacity

List all PV power resources from Solcast and write each site's resource_id, name, capacity_dc, tilt, azimuth, latitude, longitude, and loss_factor into columns A–H of this Excel sheet sorted by capacity_dc descending

The pattern: instead of pulling each site manually and assembling the table by hand, you ask for the full inventory and the sort in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the API call and the ordering inline.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with site coordinates or Solcast resource IDs, then ask it to pull irradiance data or your site inventory. The Solcast integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.