About PV Atlas#

This is the website for PV Atlas, a project led by the PV Performance Modeling Collaborative (PVPMC).

PV Atlas investigates the effect of climate and geography on various aspects of photovoltaic (PV) performance modeling and analysis. For example, how does climate affect the optimal tilt angle for a PV array? Does the energy gain from antireflective coating vary regionally? What geographic patterns exist in interannual solar resource variability? By applying scalable PV performance modeling tools to gridded weather and irradiance datasets, PV Atlas can perform detailed simulation case studies to answer these kinds of questions.

For example, here is a heatmap showing the number of years of data needed to achieve a given level of certainty in performance loss rate estimates (taken from Theristis et al. [2]):

_images/plr-uncertainty.png

Acknowledgement#

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the Solar Energy Technologies Office Award Number 38267.

Free and open-source software is a key enabler of modern scientific computing. This project uses many open-source software packages, including: