The Scenario
A solar developer handed you a Google Sheet on Friday afternoon. Twelve new rooftop installations. Final design specs are in the sheet: site name, GPS coordinates, DC capacity in kilowatts, tilt in degrees, azimuth, loss factor. Energy modeling starts Monday morning and it depends on Solcast having all 12 sites registered. Without the resource IDs, the modeling team can't run a single query.
The bad version:
- Open Solcast, navigate to the resource creation form, fill in the values for site 1 from the spreadsheet — copy the latitude, the longitude, the capacity, the tilt, the azimuth
- Submit, copy the returned resource_id, switch back to the sheet, paste it into column H
- Repeat 11 more times without a single copy-paste error, because one wrong digit in a coordinate means the irradiance data is for the wrong location
Eleven repetitions of a six-field form, with the resource_id paste at the end of each one. It's not complicated. It's just something you were not hired to do.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads the spec rows, calls the Solcast API to create each resource, and writes the returned resource_id back into column H — for all 12 rows, in one go.
For each row in this sheet — columns: site_name (A), latitude (B), longitude (C), capacity_dc_kw (D), tilt_degrees (E), azimuth_degrees (F), loss_factor (G) — create a new PV power resource in Solcast and write the returned resource_id into column H
What You Get
- Column H populated with the resource_id returned by Solcast for each new site
- Any row where creation fails (duplicate name, malformed coordinate, API validation error) gets an error message in column H instead of a blank cell
- The modeling team has 12 valid resource IDs to start querying against Monday morning
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some rows have capacity in watts instead of kilowatts and need converting before registration
For each row in A:G, check if the value in column D is greater than 10000 — if so, divide it by 1000 before using it as capacity_dc_kw when creating the Solcast site. Write the resource_id or error into column H and note the converted value in column I
Three sites don't have loss_factor values yet and should default to 0.14
For each row in A:G, if column G is blank or missing, use 0.14 as the loss_factor when creating the Solcast site. Write the resource_id into column H and 'defaulted loss_factor' into column I for any row where the default was applied
The naming convention in the sheet needs reformatting before it goes into Solcast
Before creating each Solcast site, reformat the site_name from column A by replacing spaces with underscores and converting to uppercase. Use the reformatted name for the Solcast resource, write the resource_id into column H, and write the reformatted name into column I for reference
Validate the specs, register all sites, and summarize results in one prompt
For each row in A:G, validate that latitude is between -90 and 90, longitude between -180 and 180, and capacity_dc_kw is greater than 0. For rows that pass validation, create the Solcast PV site and write the resource_id into column H. For rows that fail, write the specific validation error into column H. After processing all rows, write a summary into cell A15 showing how many sites were created successfully and how many failed
The pattern is to fold the validation, the transformation, and the registration into a single instruction so the sheet is the source of truth from start to finish.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with installation specs — even a draft with 3 rows — and ask it to register those sites in Solcast and write back the resource IDs. Also see documenting an existing site configuration or the Solcast integration overview.