bernard

Dear Martin. Again, thank you for the quick reply. Kind Regards, Bernard

Hi Martin, I was wondering if you could just answer to one more question please? The question may sound strange, I apologize for that in advance, but: Would PV*SOL accept a text file consisted of pairs of azimuths and heights where azimuths are presented as decimal values, instead of integers? For example: ? I perfectly understand that taking azimuth angles increment of 0.1 is redundant. Still I am just curious if it will work in PV*SOL? Will PV*SOL be able to import these decimal azimuth values? Thank you.

Martin, That .hor file example perfectly cleared all my doubts! And thank you for the explanation on SunEye's exclusion of near shading objects. I do not know about other persons from Valentin software, but by judging from this topic, they seem to have a very reliable support team. Once again thank you, and have a nice day.

Dear Martin, Thank you again for the reply. I did not know I can use PV*SOL 2016 in demo mode! This is truly a valuable information! So Azimuths in PV*SOL .hor files are labeled from -180 to 179? Or from -180 to 180? I am confused because both -180 and 180 show the same Azimuth. So it would be more logical for them to start at -180 and end at -179? I was lucky enough to have a chance to use SunEye 210 for at least a day, last year. Indeed it can output .hor files, and it supported outputting a PV*SOL .hor file also. However I noticed an interesting thing: SunEye threats all objects on its sunpath as opaque. Mountains, buildings and trees, there are all opaque objects. With this in mind, a .hor file generated from SunEye can be beneficial for PV software packages which do not account for trees transmittance indices. However, as PV*SOL does accounts for trees transmittance indices, it means that a PV*SOL .hor file created from SunEye is invalid. As it will threat the trees to be non-transparent obstacles. There seems to be a way of fixing this issue by actually erasing the trees from the SunEye sun path diagram.

Hi Martin, Once again thank you for the reply. Would you mind if I ask you to explain this: Does this mean that PV*SOL .hor files only use Azimuth values from -180 to 180 (instead of from 0 to 360)? Also can I have comments in my .hor files, and are comments restricted to only the first line of the .hor file? Or PV*SOL accepts comments in .hor's second, third, fourth line as well? The comments will basically be information about horizon's location, latitude, longitude, altitude... I haven't been using PV*SOL up until now, but from what I can see by looking at your v6 manual, it has some amazing abilities when it comes to shading, which some of your competitors do not (I won't post names). I think it could be beneficial for the PV*SOL to export .hor files, so that other applications could use those too. It's just a suggestion. But if you think that in this way, those other applications would benefit too much from PV*SOL's ability to export .hor files, then I will take back my suggestion.

Dear Martin, Thank you for the informative reply. Would you mind if I ask another question please? I understand that horizon files (.hor) have very simple structure consisted of Azimuth-Height pairs, which can be manually written to any text file. But does PV*SOL have an ability to generate its own .hor files, or can it only import externally created .hor files?

Dear PV*SOL community, I have a PVsys horizon profile file (.hor). Basically it's a text file containing pairs of Azimuth-Height values per each line. Height represents the value of the highest obstacle at certain Azimuth (Azimuths are direction from 0 to 360). Those obstacles, can be anything: buildings, trees, mountains... PVsys does not possess the ability of using Tree Transmitance values, so each tree is considered to be an opaque obstacle. On the other hand it looks like PV*SOL does possess this important feature by using Tree's Transmitance values. My first question is: When importing any sort of horizon file into PV*SOL, how does PV*SOL distinguish between an opaque and partly transparent obstacles? Partly transparent obstacles being the trees. If it does not (meaning: it threats all of them as opaque obstacles), how does PV*SOL horizon files account for the Tree's Transmitance values? Thank you for the reply in advance. Bernard

Dear hotline_sf, Thank you for the reply.

Thank you for the informative reply hotline_tm.

Dear Mr. Rainer, I apologize for taking me too long to reply. My question comes from a quote from a book: "Planning and Installing Photovoltaic Systems: A Guide for Installers, Architects and Engineers, Deutsche Gesellschaft Für Sonnenenergie (Dgs), Dec 2007.": Are upper mentioned default transmission indices still present in PV*SOL ? Thank you for the comment, and again apologies for not replying on time.

Thank you for the reply hotline tm, The problem is that Meteonorm can export its weather data for this location but without the snow depth and albedo information. Is there some other way you would recommend on "be ensured that there is always snow"? Can it somehow be approximated by checking for the precipipations depth along with air temperature?

Hi, I would like to conduct an analysis of fixed tilt Photovoltaic array. I need a weather file for particular location. It can not be found in the PV*SOL Climate data. But Meteonorm has it. The problem is that this Meteonorm weather file does not contain data about snow depth nor albedos. I was wondering if I could approximate this by somehow defining an albedo to be 0.6 (ground covered with wet snow) in cases when air temperature is bellow some value. Which value would that be? Something bellow 0°C. Basically when this air temperature value is present, there is snow on the ground, and when it's higher than this value, there's no snow. RETscreen advices using 0.7 albedo for -5°C temperatures, and interpolated albedo values from 0.7 to 0.2 for air temperatures between -5°C and 0°C (example: -4°C - 0.6, -3°C - 0.5, -2°C - 0.4, -1°C - 0.3, 0°C - 0.2, 1°C - 0.2...). Do you think this is correct? Any recommendations please? Thank you for the reply.

Hi. I was wondering how does the PV SOL apply the light transmission factors (degrees of transmittance)? I understand that when it comes to solar thermal systems and T SOL, the light transmission factors are used to reduce the amount of solar radiation passing through a tree object. But what about PV SOL? If I understood correctly when checking for horizon shading for PV systems, it is shading of the actual AC output that is taken into account, not the solar radiation. That is: if certain portion of the horizon is shaded by an obsutrction tree the AC output that this certain portion of the horizon yields is subracted from the overall annual AC output. So how are these light transmission factors taken into account at PV systems? Thank you for the reply.