PVSC50 Python Tutorial

Welcome! The goal of this tutorial is to introduce attendees to the pvlib python package for modeling production of PV systems. The tutorial is divided into 5 sections and several appendicies.

Tutorial Summary:

• Tutorial 0: Introduction to the tutorial, the lesson plan, and resources (~30 minutes)
• Tutorial 1: Access TMY weather data and visualize monthly irradiance data (~30 minutes)
• Tutorial 2: Calculate solar position, plane-of-array irradiance, and visualize average daily insolation (30 minutes)
• Tutorial 3: Estimate module temperature from ambient (~20 minutes)
• Tutorial 4: Use POA irradiance and module temperature to model output power from a single module (~20 minutes)
• Tutorial 5: Combine modules to form strings, calculate inverter efficiency and total array output (~independent study)
• Tutorials Appendices: More tutorials on a variety of fun topics (~independent study)

Tutorial Setup

These tutorials are made with Jupyter, which is a browser based interactive Python notebook that allows you to run the tutorials in the cloud without any additional setup. On the day of the tutorial, we will use Google Colaboratory.

Google Colaboratory

To run these tutorials in Google Colaboratory you can click the button below:

You can also select Colaboratory from the launch icon at the top of each tutorial in the Jupyter book.

Installing Requirements

When using Google Colaboratory, you must uncomment the first cell that installs the tutorial requirements.

!pip install -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PVSC-Python-Tutorials/PVSC50/main/requirements.txt

Jupyter Books

The full tutorial is hosted as a Jupyter book. This book has navigation, search, and can be used to launch each book in Colaboratory.

My Binder

The tutorials will remain available on GitHub, and you can run the tutorial anytime in Binder by clicking the following link:

Locally

You can also run the tutorial locally with miniconda by following thes steps:

1. Install miniconda.

2. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/PVSC-Python-Tutorials/PVSC50.git
   

3. Create the environment and install the requirements. The repository includes a requirements.txt file that contains a list the packages needed to run this tutorial. To install them using conda run:

   conda create -n pvsc50 jupyter -c pvlib --file requirements.txt
   conda activate pvsc50
   

4. Start a Jupyter session:

   jupyter notebook
   

5. Use the file explorer in Jupyter lab to browse to PVSC50 and start the first Tutorial.

Licensing

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.