PVAnalytics#

PVAnalytics is a python library that supports analytics for PV systems. It provides functions for quality control, filtering, and feature labeling and other tools supporting the analysis of PV system-level data. It can be used as a standalone analysis package and as a data cleaning “front end” for other PV analysis packages.

PVAnalytics is free and open source under a permissive license. The source code for PVAnalytics is hosted on github.

Library Overview#

The functions provided by PVAnalytics are organized in submodules based on their anticipated use. The list below provides a general overview; however, not all modules have functions at this time, see the API reference for current library status.

  • quality contains submodules for different kinds of data quality checks.

    • quality.data_shifts contains quality checks for detecting and isolating data shifts in PV time series data.

    • quality.irradiance contains quality checks for irradiance measurements.

    • quality.weather contains quality checks for weather data (e.g. tests for physically plausible values of temperature, wind speed, humidity).

    • quality.outliers contains functions for identifying outliers.

    • quality.gaps contains functions for identifying gaps in the data (i.e. missing values, stuck values, and interpolation).

    • quality.time quality checks related to time (e.g. timestamp spacing, time shifts).

    • quality.util general purpose quality functions (e.g. simple range checks).

  • features contains submodules with different methods for identifying and labeling salient features.

    • features.clipping functions for labeling inverter clipping.

    • features.clearsky functions for identifying periods of clear sky conditions.

    • features.daytime functions for identifying periods of day and night.

    • features.orientation functions for identifying orientation-related features in the data (e.g. days where the data looks like there is a functioning tracker). These functions are distinct from the functions in the system module in that we are identifying features of data rather than properties of the system that produced the data.

    • features.shading functions for identifying shadows.

  • system identification of PV system characteristics from data (e.g. nameplate power, tilt, azimuth)

  • metrics contains functions for computing PV system-level metrics (e.g. performance ratio)

Dependencies#

This project follows the guidelines laid out in NEP-29. It supports:

  • All minor versions of Python released 42 months prior to the project, and at minimum the two latest minor versions.

  • All minor versions of numpy released in the 24 months prior to the project, and at minimum the last three minor versions

  • The latest release of pvlib.

Additionally, PVAnalytics relies on several other packages in the open source scientific python ecosystem. For details on dependencies and versions, see our setup.py.