A Developer's Guide to LandGate's Nationwide Solar 8760 Report & Long Term Generation Data
- Craig Kaiser
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
For solar developers, investors, and asset managers, confirming that a site has strong sun and clean, buildable land is only the starting point. The harder physical question is how the project will actually perform: exactly how much electricity it will generate, when that generation lands across the hours of a day and the seasons of a year, and how steadily that output will decline as the equipment ages. Those questions sit at the heart of LandGate's Solar 8760 & Long Term Generation Analysis, which models a project's energy production at hourly resolution for a representative year and then projects it across a full 40-year operating life.
This post walks through each section of an 8760 report, explaining what data is provided and why it matters for anyone evaluating whether a solar project will produce the output its economics depend on. The figures cited throughout come from the attached sample report, a single 120.37 MWdc (100.31 MWac) planned solar farm in Berks County, Pennsylvania, with an operating start date of July 1, 2030. The term "8760" itself refers to the number of hours in a year (24 hours times 365 days), and an 8760 analysis is the industry shorthand for modeling generation hour by hour rather than as a single annual number.
Instantly Access Nationwide Generation Data via LLM
LandGate's solar generation data is available nationwide and fully optimized for AI. Using our Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, you can pipe this granular, hourly production data directly into your LLMs (like ChatGPT, Claude, or internal tools) to automatically generate custom generation profiles, programmatically build portfolio production dashboards, and stress test capacity factors across thousands of parcels in seconds.
8760 Report Starting Point: Site Outline and Project Footprint
The report opens by establishing the physical context of the project: the site's identifying attributes (nameplate capacity in both direct current and alternating current, location, and operating start date) alongside a map of the parcel footprint. In the sample, the project is a single planned farm of 120.37 MWdc and 100.31 MWac, located in Berks County, Pennsylvania, with production beginning July 1, 2030.
These framing details matter because generation is a function of both the equipment and the land it sits on. The site outline map overlays the project footprint with nearby electric substations, power plants, and transmission lines color coded by voltage class, along with a pricing bus, giving an immediate read on grid proximity. Just as important, the map layers in a full set of exclusion types: topography bands (5, 8, 12, and 15 percent slope), dwellings, flood zones, waterways, tree canopy, wetlands, parks and wilderness, pipelines, wells, and more. These exclusions define how much of the parcel is genuinely usable, and the buildable footprint is what ultimately constrains how much capacity can be installed and how much energy the site can produce.
Lifetime Generation Summary: The Headline Output
This is the at-a-glance core of the report. It answers the question every developer and investor needs answered first: how much will this asset generate, how efficiently, and how does that change over its life?
The summary presents the project's output at three points in time. For the sample project these figures are:
Year 1 Generation:Â 243,984 MWh, at a capacity factor of 27.8 percent.
Final Year Generation:Â 196,407 MWh, at a capacity factor of 22.4 percent.
Lifetime Generation:Â 8,807,825 MWh, at a lifetime capacity factor of 25.1 percent.
The capacity factor is the key efficiency metric here. It expresses actual expected output as a percentage of the theoretical maximum if the plant ran at full nameplate capacity every hour of the year. The mid-20s figure shown is consistent with a project of this configuration in the mid-Atlantic, and it is the single variable that most directly translates installed capacity into delivered energy. Two projects with identical nameplate can have materially different economics if their capacity factors differ, which is why this number anchors everything downstream.
The section also includes a chart of monthly generation plotted for several snapshot years (Year 1, Year 5, Year 15, Year 30, and the Final Year). Two patterns stand out at once. First, the strong seasonal curve: output climbs from roughly 10,000 to 12,000 MWh per month in midwinter to a summer peak near 29,000 to 30,000 MWh in June, before falling back through autumn. Second, the steady downward spacing between the year curves, which is the visual signature of panel degradation. Together they show not just how much the project generates, but how that generation is shaped across the calendar and slowly compressed over decades.
Generation by Year
Where the summary compresses the project into a few headline numbers, the Generation by Year table unfolds output across the full operating life. For each of the 40 years it lists the farm's generation in MWh, the cumulative degradation percentage, and the resulting percent of original output.
Reading down the table reveals the asset's physical decline in a way no single figure can. In the sample, generation starts at 243,984 MWh in Year 1 (100 percent of original) and steps down by a consistent 0.5 percent of the original each year, reaching 196,407 MWh by Year 40, which is 80.5 percent of the starting output after 19.5 percent cumulative degradation. This linear degradation schedule is the assumption baked into every revenue projection that depends on the report, and laying it out year by year lets a developer or acquirer see exactly how much output erodes over a holding period, confirm the degradation rate against warranty and manufacturer expectations, and model production for any year they intend to own or finance the asset.
Understanding the 8760: Hourly Generation Detail
The remaining sections move from annual totals into the hour-by-hour resolution that gives the report its name. Rather than printing all 8,760 individual hourly values, the report aggregates them into readable matrices: each table runs months down the rows and hours of the day across the columns (hours 4 through 20, meaning roughly 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.), with totals summed along both edges. All values are expressed in the project's local time zone, America/New_York (EDT) in the sample. This month-by-hour structure is what makes the data actionable, because it shows not just how much a project generates but precisely when, which is the dimension that drives revenue capture, curtailment exposure, and storage and offtake decisions.
2D and 3D Irradiance
Irradiance is the instantaneous solar power striking a surface, measured in watts per square meter. The report presents it two ways. The 2D view models the resource on a flat, horizontal basis, while the 3D view models it against the site's actual three-dimensional surface, incorporating terrain and array geometry.
The difference between the two is meaningful. In the sample, the 3D irradiance totals run roughly 20 percent above the 2D totals (59.53 versus 49.61 on the average basis shown), reflecting the additional energy captured once real-world surface orientation is accounted for rather than assuming a flat plane. Both views share the same shape: values are zero in the pre-dawn and post-dusk hours, rise to a midday peak that is highest in the late-spring and summer months, and taper into winter. Presenting the horizontal and three-dimensional cases side by side lets an analyst separate the raw site resource from the gain attributable to how the array actually sits on the land.
Irradiation: The Cumulative Energy Resource
Where irradiance measures instantaneous power, irradiation measures energy: it is irradiance integrated over time, expressed in kilowatt-hours per square meter. The report provides both a total irradiation table and an average irradiation table across the same month-by-hour grid.
In the sample, total annual irradiation sums to roughly 1,510 kWh/m2, which represents the project's solar resource, the fuel available to the array before any conversion losses. This is the foundational input that, combined with system capacity and efficiency, produces the generation figures elsewhere in the report. Expressing the resource as cumulative energy (rather than instantaneous power) is what lets a developer compare this site's fuel against other candidate sites on a consistent basis and sanity-check the generation forecast against the underlying resource.
Net Energy to Grid
This is the bottom-line physical deliverable: the electricity actually delivered to the grid after the solar resource is converted through the array and inverters, after system losses, and after the alternating current capacity limit is applied. The report shows both total grid energy and average grid energy, again across the full month-by-hour matrix.
For the sample, net energy to grid sums to 243,902 MWh in the first year, closely matching the Year 1 generation figure from the summary. The hourly detail surfaces a feature that annual totals hide entirely: inverter clipping. During peak midday hours in the high-resource summer months, the values flatten at a ceiling (around 3,025 MWh for a given hour-month in the sample) because output is capped at the 100.31 MWac interconnection limit even when the panels could produce more. That ceiling is the visible footprint of the project's dc-to-ac ratio, and it has direct economic consequences.
This table is the most decision-relevant in the report, because the timing of delivered energy determines how output aligns with price periods, peak demand windows, and curtailment risk. A developer can read this shape directly into offtake and PPA structuring, storage sizing, and revenue capture analysis, all of which depend on when the megawatt-hours arrive, not merely how many there are over a year.
What This Report Tells You and What It Doesn't
A LandGate Solar 8760 & Long Term Generation Analysis is a screening and production-modeling tool. It uses site parameters, modeled solar resource, system configuration, and a standardized degradation schedule to produce a generation picture that is directionally accurate and immediately useful for siting, sizing, and preliminary revenue analysis. It is not a substitute for the independent engineering report, the measured-data production model, and the confirmed interconnection terms that a project requires to reach financial close.
Report Section | Decision It Supports |
Site Outline | Confirming the buildable footprint and grid and exclusion context |
Lifetime Generation Summary | Establishing headline output and capacity factor |
Generation by Year | Modeling degradation and long-term output decline |
2D and 3D Irradiance | Understanding the raw solar resource and the gain from terrain and array geometry |
Irradiation | Quantifying the cumulative annual energy resource |
Net Energy to Grid | Shaping offtake, curtailment, storage, and revenue-capture decisions |
What comes after a strong generation screening is detailed diligence, measured-resource validation, and interconnection and offtake negotiation. The report's value is in giving developers and investors enough information to decide quickly whether a project's expected output justifies that deeper commitment of time and capital, and to enter those later stages with a realistic, time-resolved view of how the asset will perform.
Access Solar Generation Data
The gap between a site that looks sunny and one that delivers bankable production is almost always in the detail: the buildable footprint, the time shape of output, the dc-to-ac clipping, and the slow grind of degradation all interact in ways that are difficult to judge by intuition. LandGate's Solar 8760 & Long Term Generation Analysis brings that full physical picture forward to the screening stage, giving developers and investors a data-driven view of how much a project will generate, and exactly when, before significant capital is committed. For anyone evaluating multiple candidate projects, it turns production performance into a screening criterion rather than a late-stage surprise.
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LandGate Solar 8760 & Long Term Generation Analyses are based on site parameters, modeled solar resource, and standardized system and degradation models. Results are directional estimates intended for screening and production-analysis purposes and should not be used as a substitute for a project's independent engineering review, measured-resource production model, or confirmed interconnection and offtake terms. Actual generation, capacity factor, and delivered energy may differ from report findings.
