What’s New¶
These are new features and improvements of note in each release.
v0.1.0 (March 17, 2015)¶
This is the first official release of the pvlib-python project. As such, a “What’s new” document is a little hard to write. There will be significant overlap with the to-be-written document that describes the differences between pvlib-python and PVLIB_Matlab.
API changes¶
- Remove pvl_ from module names.
- Consolidation of similar modules. For example, functions from pvl_clearsky_ineichen.py and pvl_clearsky_haurwitz.py have been consolidated into clearsky.py.
- Return one DataFrame instead of a tuple of DataFrames.
- Change function and module names so that they do not conflict.
New features¶
- Library is Python 3.3 and 3.4 compatible
- Add What’s New section to docs (GH10)
- Add PyEphem option to solar position calculations.
- Add a Python translation of NREL’s SPA algorithm.
- irradiance.py has more AOI, projection, and irradiance sum and calculation functions
- TMY data import has a coerce_year option
- TMY data can be loaded from a url (GH5)
- Locations are now pvlib.location.Location objects, not “structs”.
- Specify time zones using a string from the standard IANA Time Zone Database naming conventions or using a pytz.timezone instead of an integer GMT offset. We may add dateutils support in the future.
- clearsky.ineichen supports interpolating monthly Linke Turbidities to daily resolution.
Other changes¶
- Removed Vars=Locals(); Expect...; var=pvl\_tools.Parse(Vars,Expect); pattern. Very few tests of input validitity remain. Garbage in, garbage or nan out.
- Removing unnecssary and sometimes undesired behavior such as setting maximum zenith=90 or airmass=0. Instead, we make extensive use of nan values.
- Adding logging calls, removing print calls.
- Improved PEP8 compliance.
- Added /pvlib/data for lookup tables, test, and tutorial data.
- Limited the scope of clearsky.py‘s scipy dependency. clearsky.ineichen will work without scipy so long as the Linke Turbidity is supplied as a keyword argument. (GH13)
- Removed NREL’s SPA code to comply with their license (GH9).
- Revised the globalinplane function and added a test_globalinplane (GH21, GH33).
Documentation¶
Testing¶
- Tests are cleaner and more thorough. They are still nowhere near complete.
- Using Coveralls to measure test coverage.
- Using TravisCI for automated testing.
- Using nosetests for more concise test code.
Bug fixes¶
- Fixed DISC algorithm bugs concerning modifying input zenith Series (GH24), the Kt conditional evaluation (GH6), and ignoring the input pressure (GH25).
- Many more bug fixes were made, but you’ll have to look at the detailed commit history.
- Fixed inconsistent azimuth angle in the ephemeris function (GH40)
Contributors¶
This list includes all (I hope) contributors to pvlib/pvlib-python, Sandia-Labs/PVLIB_Python, and UARENForecasting/PVLIB_Python.
- Rob Andrews
- Will Holmgren
- bmu
- Tony Lorenzo
- jforbess
- Jorissup
- dacoex
- alexisph
- Uwe Krien