PVMAPS

[ Please note that this software is not currently being maintained ]

A software suite for estimating solar radiation and PV performance over geographical regions

User's Manual

The user's manual explains how to install the software and data and how to run the different tools.

Software packages

The PVMAPS software tools consist of two parts:

Modules (source files) written for the open-source GRASS GIS software which must be compiled with the GRASS source code installation.
Scripts to run the GRASS modules and other calculations in the GRASS environment.

The user manual describes the installation procedure and what each tool and script does.

Data for running the PVGIS calculations

The GRASS rasters needed to run the calculations are stored in two files:

Note that the files are about 25GB in total. This data set should contain all what is necessary to run the PVGIS scripts, except for the high-resolution DEM data.

Due to the large amount of data, the high-resolution DEM data are stored as tiles with a size of 2.5° latitude/longitude. At the moment, these data are available only for Europe, but we expect to make these data available for a larger area very soon. Since there will be several hundreds of files we have compiled a list of the presently available files. Each tile can be downloaded individually. For instance, the tile dem_08_076.tar can be downloaded using the address

https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvmaps/dem_tiles/dem_08_076.tar

Since it will be cumbersome to download many files individually, we have made a little PHP script that will download all the files in the tile list, called download_tiles.php
The script is run as:

php download_tiles.php tile_list.txt

You can also use tools such as wget.