How to Connect Solcast to Google Sheets (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Solcast

You have a Google Sheet 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 spreadsheet — or pushing new site records from a sheet 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, paste it into the sheet, reformat the columns to match the model, and repeat that sequence every time the model updates.

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

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

The default. You open Solcast, navigate to the site or the irradiance query interface, copy whatever tabular data is visible, and paste it into your sheet. If you need data for twenty sites, you do that twenty times — once per coordinate pair.

For a one-off feasibility check, it's survivable. For a monthly energy reporting cycle covering a portfolio of sites, it's a different story. Solar irradiance data doesn't come in convenient chunks — it comes in time-series rows, one per day per site, and a single 365-day pull for 20 sites is 7,300 rows that have to land somewhere in the right order. The coordination overhead compounds fast, and the risk of pasting into the wrong sheet or the wrong column grows with every repetition.

Method 2: Zapier or Make

Both platforms have Solcast connector options. You can wire up a trigger — a scheduled time, a sheet change, a new row — and from there make the Solcast API call and write the result back into the spreadsheet.

Before you go further: do you know what a Solcast API endpoint looks like? What a resource ID is? How to map a JSON response with nested arrays into flat rows? How to authenticate to the Solcast developer portal? If those terms feel slightly foreign, this path is going to cost you more time than it saves. You're better off reading Method 3 or jumping straight to Method 4.

Still here? Good. The automation works when it's built correctly. You set up the trigger, configure the Solcast action, pick the right endpoint for historical irradiance or site inventory, map the response fields to sheet columns, and handle the authentication token.

But a row-by-row automation is not a bulk pull.

Running irradiance queries for 20 sites means 20 separate trigger fires, 20 API calls, and a task log that becomes unreadable when one site's coordinates are slightly malformed and the automation silently skips it.

You probably just need the GHI and DNI for each site so the energy model can run. You probably don't know what a Zap action for a Solcast endpoint looks like — and there's no reason you should. So you hand the request to whoever on your team builds these integrations, and now you're sitting on your hands waiting while they work through the authentication setup.

And once you need to aggregate across sites, filter by date range, or join irradiance data against a separate capacity table — you've left native automation territory entirely.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

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

That was a real step up from copy-paste. 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, or your sheet added a column, the 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 Google Sheets

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, 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 365 days of irradiance data for 20 sites

For each lat/lon pair in columns A and B (20 rows), fetch 365 days of historical daily irradiance data from Solcast ending yesterday, and write the site number, date, GHI, DNI, and ambient_temp into a sheet named 'Historical Data' — one row per day per site

Every coordinate pair gets queried, the full time-series lands in the right sheet, and the columns are labeled exactly as specified. No looping through a Zap, no counting rows.

Example 2: Export the full PV site inventory

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 the 'Site Registry' tab sorted by capacity_dc descending

The pattern: instead of navigating the Solcast UI for each site and transcribing fields, you ask for the whole 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 Google Sheet 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.