The Scenario
It's the third week of October. Your renewables portfolio manager just forwarded a message from the insurance broker: the annual submission is due in two weeks and it needs a complete inventory of all PV power sites — installed DC capacity, tilt, azimuth, GPS coordinates, derating factors. You manage 35 sites registered in Solcast. The broker wants everything in an Excel workbook.
The bad version:
- Open Solcast, navigate to the site management interface, click into site 1, screenshot or manually copy the parameters into a new Excel worksheet
- Repeat for each of the 35 sites, maintaining consistent column names across all of them
- Realize at site 22 that you've been recording "azimuth" in degrees for some rows and as a compass direction for others, and go back to reconcile
Thirty-five sites. One afternoon that should have gone to actually reviewing the data.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It connects to Solcast through its built-in integration, retrieves the full list of registered PV sites, and writes every field directly into the workbook in whatever order you specify.
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
What You Get
- One row per registered Solcast site, 35 rows, sorted largest-to-smallest by DC capacity
- Columns A–H populated with resource_id, name, capacity_dc, tilt, azimuth, latitude, longitude, loss_factor in that order
- A total capacity summary row SheetXAI can add at the bottom if you ask
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The broker's template requires a specific column order that doesn't match Solcast's default field order
Retrieve all Solcast PV power sites and write them into this sheet in this exact column order: name (A), latitude (B), longitude (C), capacity_dc (D), loss_factor (E), tilt (F), azimuth (G), resource_id (H)
Two sites in Solcast are registered under test names from the development phase and should be excluded
List all Solcast PV power sites, exclude any site whose name starts with 'TEST_' or 'DEV_', and write the remaining sites into columns A–H sorted by capacity_dc descending
The submission needs a separate worksheet with sites grouped by region, using a country code from column I in the existing data
After writing the full site inventory into 'All Sites', create a sheet named 'By Region' and group the sites by the country code in column I of 'All Sites', writing each region's sites together with a header row showing the country code and total DC capacity for that group
Pull the inventory, add total capacity, flag underperforming sites, and format for the broker in one shot
Retrieve all Solcast PV power sites and write them into this sheet sorted by capacity_dc descending. Add a total capacity sum row at the bottom. Flag any site with loss_factor above 0.15 with 'review' in column I. Format the capacity_dc column as a number with 1 decimal place and the label 'kW'
The pattern: the submission prep, the flagging, and the formatting are one prompt, not four separate manual steps.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook where you've been manually tracking your Solcast site list, and ask it to pull the full current inventory in one go. Also see pulling historical irradiance data or the Solcast integration overview.