The Budget Analysis dashboard provides a portfolio-level Budget vs. Actual view of energy production. It combines two complementary widgets:
- Energy Waterfall — decomposes the gap between the Energy Budget and the Actual / Forecasted production into discrete contribution categories (resource variance, availability, performance, grid & curtailment, dispatch, other adjustments).
- Cumulative Time Series — shows how Budget, Actual and Projected production accumulate (or are produced per period) over the selected period, across one or more sites and grouped by site, technology or country.
Both widgets are driven by the same portal selectors — Asset selector (one or many sites), From / To date and the data resolution — so changing those re-runs both charts consistently.
1. Energy Waterfall
The waterfall reads an ordered set of daily tags for the selected sites and renders them as floating columns: each column starts where the previous one left off, additive steps go up, subtractive steps go down, and the final Actual Production column is drawn full-height from zero as the period result.
1.1 Step categories
| Step | Sign | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Energy Budget | + | Target energy production derived from the long-term yield assessment / energy model. This is the baseline against which every subsequent step is measured. |
| Resource Variance | ± | Delta between observed and budgeted resource (irradiance, wind, hydrology). Positive when the period was resource-rich vs. plan, negative when it was resource-poor. |
| Availability Losses | − | Production lost to equipment downtime, outages and maintenance events. |
| Performance Losses | − | Production lost to underperformance of available equipment — soiling, degradation, derates, etc. |
| Grid & Curtailment | − | Energy not delivered because of grid constraints, off-take limits or curtailment instructions from the system operator. |
| Dispatch & Strategy | ± | Adjustments tied to dispatch decisions and commercial strategy (e.g. battery cycling choices, market arbitrage). Can be positive or negative. |
| Other Adjustments | ± | Residual adjustments not captured in the categories above. Should be small in a well-instrumented site. |
| Forecasted Production | ± | P50 projection of the production still to come between today and the period end. It bridges Actual to the forecasted period total and is rendered with a hatched fill so it is visually distinct from realised values. |
| Actual Production | = | Energy delivered to date over the selected period, summed across the selected portfolio. Drawn full-height from zero as the period’s closing total. |
1.2 Stacking by site / technology / country
Every step is split into segments — one per group — so you can see which sites (or technologies, or countries) contribute most to each step. Click a legend entry to hide that group; the waterfall totals are recomputed for the visible groups so the chart always represents the currently selected portfolio.
1.3 Toolbar (collapsed by default)
Click the Options caret below the chart to expand the toolbar:
- Group by: Site, Technology (Solar / Wind / BESS / Hydro) or Country. Toggling does not re-fetch — it just re-aggregates the cached per-site values, so it is instant.
- Reverse (▲ / ▼): swaps the column order so the waterfall reads Actual → Budget instead of Budget → Actual. Useful when you want to start from realised production and walk back to the original target.
2. Cumulative Time Series
The cumulative chart shows the running (or per-interval) production for one or more tags across the selected portfolio. By default it plots three series: Energy Budget, Actual Production and the Projected Production scenarios (P10 / P50 / P90).
2.1 Linear vs. Stacked-area mode
- Linear — one line per tag, summed across all selected sites. This is the default and the cleanest way to compare Budget vs. Actual vs. Projected at the portfolio level.
- Stacked area — one area per (tag, group) pair, stacked per tag. Use it together with the Group by control to see which sites / technologies / countries contribute most to each tag.
2.2 Cumulative vs. Instantaneous
- Cumulative (default): each point is the running total from the period start. The Projected series start where the Actual series ends, so the projected line / area continues seamlessly from the realised production.
- Instantaneous: each point is the per-interval value (no accumulation). Use this view to spot daily / weekly patterns or anomalies.
2.3 Projected scenarios (P10 / P50 / P90)
The three projection tags are fetched only for the today → end-date window (no redundant data for past days). In Cumulative mode each projection starts from the cumulative max of the Actual line — the realised total to date — so the three scenarios fan out from the same anchor point:
- P50 — central / most-likely forecast. Shown as the primary projection in both this widget and the waterfall.
- P10 — pessimistic 10th-percentile scenario (low-bound).
- P90 — optimistic 90th-percentile scenario (high-bound).
In stacked-area mode the projected series are rendered with a diagonal-line pattern fill so they are visually distinct from the solid Actual / Budget areas, even when they share the same group colour.
2.4 Toolbar (collapsed by default)
Click the Options caret below the chart to expand the toolbar:
- Mode: Linear or Stacked area.
- Aggregation: Cumulative or Instantaneous.
- Group by: Site, Technology or Country (only active in stacked-area mode).
3. Tags used by both widgets
| Role | Tag | Used in |
|---|---|---|
| Energy Budget | EnergyBudget.1d | Waterfall + Cumulative |
| Resource variance | ResourceVariance.1d | Waterfall |
| Availability losses | AvailabilityLosses.1d | Waterfall |
| Performance losses | PerformanceLosses.1d | Waterfall |
| Grid & curtailment | GridAndCurtailment.1d | Waterfall |
| Dispatch & strategy | DispatchAndStrategy.1d | Waterfall |
| Other adjustments | OtherAdjustments.1d | Waterfall |
| Actual production | ActualProduction.1d | Waterfall + Cumulative |
| Projected — P50 | ProjectedProductionP50.1d | Waterfall + Cumulative |
| Projected — P10 | ProjectedProductionP10.1d | Cumulative |
| Projected — P90 | ProjectedProductionP90.1d | Cumulative |
4. Selectors and behaviour
- Asset selector: pick one or many sites. Both widgets fan out one request per (site × tag) sequentially — progress is logged in the browser console.
- From / To date: defines the analysis window. The cumulative chart pins its X-axis to these exact dates (no auto-padding), and the Projected tags are fetched only for the today → To sub-window.
- Resolution: typically 1d for budget analyses. With daily resolution, all timestamps are normalised to UTC midnight so cross-site sums collapse onto the same calendar day even when sites report in different local timezones.
- Unit / Scale factor: the default scale factor converts kWh from the time-series API into the display unit (typically MWh) — adjust on the report properties if your tags are already in MWh.
5. Tips and good practice
- Use the waterfall to answer “why is actual different from budget?” — it shows the magnitude of every contributing category at a glance.
- Use the cumulative chart to answer “are we on track for the period?” — the gap between the Actual + Projected line and the Budget line at the To date is the expected end-of-period over- or under-performance.
- When investigating a single under-performing site, hide the others in the legend rather than re-running with a single asset: both widgets recompute totals and stacks for the visible selection.
- The two widgets share their toolbars under a collapsible Options caret to keep the dashboard clean — expand it only when you need to change a view.