Earth Notes: Grid-Tied Rooftop Solar PV Generation Stats via Sunny Beam
Updated 2022-09-12.The Sunny Beam receives generation levels from the inverters in the loft by radio. The Sunny Beam is plugged into the Raspberry Pi USB to power it and poll for stats every minute.
Periods of zero generation (after an initial 0 sample) are not recorded to save space and energy.
See copies of the per-minute and per-day gathering scripts below. These use sunnybeamtool to talk to the SMA SunnyBeam plugged into the RPi server's USB:
The Raw 16WW Solar PV Intraday Generation Data (daily) goes back further, to 2009-09. It initially relied on manually downloading the data, so has gaps. Sometimes the tool reports data as corrupt and it is effectively lost. The SunnyBeam clock drifts and so the finer-grained data in the same files would need to be corrected for drift.
The PV went up in phases: the west facing part (1/4 of the final size) went up first (2008-02). Then twice that facing east (2009-02), then a final chunk doubling the size of the west-facing array (2010-04). 
Dataset
- name
- 16WW 1-minute Sunny Beam PV grid-tie power generation
- description
- 16WW grid-tied solar PV generation, by minute UTC; suburban domestic 5.16kWp microgeneration system, 50% east-facing, 50% west-facing, 23 degree slope roof, Kingston-upon-Thames, London, UK
- version
- 1
- keywords
- solar, PV, grid-tie, generation, microgeneration, domestic
- variable measured
- power
- date created
- 2014-07-21T10:13Z
- date published
- 2019-09-26T06:36:55Z
- date modified
- 2025-07
- temporal coverage
- 2014-07-21T10:13Z/..
- spatial coverage
- UK centre 51.406696N,-0.288789E elevation 16m
- distribution
- directory of 1-minute grid-tie generation data by day
- canonical URL
- this descriptive text with markup
- is part of
- 16WW Dataset
- licence
- this dataset is licensed under CC0, ie it is effectively public domain; if you make use of this data, attribution is welcome but not obligatory
- is accessible for free
- true