What’s New

These are new features and improvements of note in each release.

v0.2.0 (July 6, 2015)

This is a major release from 0.1 and includes a large number of API changes, several new features and enhancements along with a number of bug fixes. We recommend that all users upgrade to this version.

Due to the large number of API changes, you will probably need to update your code.

API changes

  • Change variable names to conform with new Variables and style rules wiki. This impacts many function declarations and return values. Your existing code probably will not work! (GH37, GH54).
  • Move dirint and disc algorithms from clearsky.py to irradiance.py (GH42)
  • Mark some pvsystem.py methods as private (GH20)
  • Make output of pvsystem.sapm_celltemp a DataFrame (GH54)

Enhancements

  • Add conda installer
  • PEP8 fixups to solarposition.py and spa.py (GH50)
  • Add optional projection_ratio keyword argument to the haydavies calculator. Speeds calculations when irradiance changes but solar position remains the same (GH58)
  • Improved installation instructions in README.

Bug fixes

  • fix local build of the documentation (GH49, GH56)
  • The release date of 0.1 was fixed in the documentation (see v0.1.0 (April 20, 2015))
  • fix casting of DateTimeIndex to int64 epoch timestamp on machines with 32 bit python int (GH63)
  • fixed some docstrings with failing doctests (GH62)

Contributors

  • Will Holmgren
  • Rob Andrews
  • bmu
  • Tony Lorenzo

v0.1.0 (April 20, 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

  • Using readthedocs for documentation hosting.
  • Many typos and formatting errors corrected (GH16)
  • Documentation source code and tutorials live in / rather than /pvlib/docs.
  • Additional tutorials in /docs/tutorials.
  • Clarify pvsystem.systemdef input (GH17)

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