Commercial PV telemetry readiness checklist

Good performance analysis depends less on a particular monitoring vendor than on clear measurement meaning. Before uploading historical data, assemble the telemetry, site configuration, weather context, and operating notes needed to distinguish measured behavior from modeled expectations and data-quality limitations.

1. Assemble site configuration

• Site name, stable identifier, location, and IANA timezone.
• DC and AC capacity with explicit kilowatt units.
• Array tilt, azimuth, and tracking type where available.
• Commissioning date, major repowers, and equipment boundaries.
• Site-specific energy value and currency for qualified financial estimates.

2. Prepare telemetry columns

At minimum, provide one timezone-aware timestamp and site-level AC power or interval AC energy. Include irradiance, temperature, status, and equipment identifiers when those signals are trustworthy. Use one row per intended interval and keep original source exports available for reconciliation.

3. Review timestamp quality

Confirm the timezone, daylight-saving behavior, cadence, and whether timestamps represent the beginning or end of an interval. Identify duplicates and gaps without silently deleting them. If multiple files overlap, define a deterministic precedence rule and preserve the source of each accepted record.

4. Run a pre-analysis quality screen

1. Count rows, duplicates, missing intervals, and non-finite values.
2. Check physical ranges against the documented measurement boundary.
3. Identify frozen sequences and unexpected cadence changes.
4. Compare coverage by site and month before calculating portfolio rankings.
5. Record every exclusion or normalization as an explicit quality result.

5. Supply operating context

Provide known curtailment, export limits, planned outages, snow periods, maintenance windows, sensor changes, and monitoring-platform migrations when available. This context does not replace detector evidence, but it helps an analyst test alternative explanations and avoid presenting uncertain causes as confirmed.

After import, reconcile the accepted row count, analysis period, capacity, and energy totals with the source system. A professional workflow reports per-site import failures and data limitations instead of allowing one malformed file to invalidate an entire fleet audit.