Photovoltaic technology currently provides 3% of our energy worldwide, and this clean energy source is projected to continue increasing. From development aspects to deployment and management of assets, PV modeling is a very interesting area with challenges and use of big data from weather to performance monitoring. Modeling tools for all aspects of photovoltaic systems are rapidly growing, and there are solutions for many of the things you might want to simulate. Python is becoming one of the scientific languages of choice, and many open-source tools are available for PV modeling. This tutorial will focus on teaching attendees PV modeling in python through the use of PVlib.

In this interactive tutorial we will go from getting acquainted with some common data used or measured in pv systems (i.e. weather), to modeling the AC energy output of a single-axis tracker system. This includes learning and simulating sun position, plane of array irradiances, single-diode models, temperature models, and inverter output. We will review common vocabulary around python and common PV data aggregation by hour, week, month, and visualization. The tutorial will finalize with an overview of other available open-source tools for other aspects of modeling PV systems, as well as novel ideas on data science in the PV field.