PV Free

A public API for PV modeling parameters and pvlib API for learning about solar.

Announcements

2025-03-22: Now that ElephantSQL has reached its end-of-life, and the Aiven migration is working as expected, the dev website deployed at AlwaysData has been terminated. Please use https://pvfree.azurewebsites.net/ only.

Hosting

pvfree is hosted at Microsoft Azure Cloud App service. Please use https://pvfree.azurewebsites.net/ to get module and inverter parameters for pvlib and to learn about solar energy modeling.

The pvfree database is hosted at Aiven using PostgreSQL.

Contributing

The pytest.ini file is set to run using DJANGO.SETTINGS_MODULE=pvfree.settings.dev and find all tests automatically, to allow you to use just the pytest command instead of python manage.py test testdir --settings pvfree.settings.dev.

Usage

Browsing to pvfree.azurewebsites.net/api/v1/pvinverter/ will display a JSON string with the first 20 records. The endpoint and query string to obtain the next set api/pvinverter/?limit=20&offset=20 is contained in the next key of the string as are the endpoints for each inverter. Note: the query string ?format=json is only necessary when using the API url directly in a browser to display the response.

Tastypie

The API is generated by the Tastypie django extension. Add the following endpoints to the base URL, https://pvfree.azurewebsites.net/:

• Get first 20 pvinverters.

    api/pvinverter/
  

• Get first pvinverter.

    api/pvinverter/1/
  

• Get pvinverter set containing #'s 2, 3, 5, and 10.

    api/pvinverter/set/2;3;5;10/
  

• Get 100 pvinverters starting from pvinverter # 500.

    api/pvinverter/?limit=100&offset=500
  

• Get pvinverter database schema.

    api/pvinverter/schema/
  

Python Requests

Python has several libraries for interacting with URLs. The Requests package is available from PyPI.

>>> import requests
>>> response = requests.get('https://pvfree.azurewebsites.net/api/v1/pvinverter/set/1;3;5/')
>>> response
  <Response [200]>
>>> response.status_code
  200
>>> response.content
  {"objects": [{"C0": -2.48104842861e-05, "C1": -9.0149429405099999e-05, "C2": 0.00066889632690700005, "C3": -0.018880466688599998, "Idcmax": 10.0, "MPPT_hi": 50.0, "MPPT_low": 20.0, "Paco": 250.0, "Pdco": 259.52205054799998, "Pnt": 0.02, "Pso": 1.7716142241299999, "Sandia_ID": 1399, "Tamb_low": -40.0, "Tamb_max": 85.0, "Vaco": 208.0, "Vdcmax": 65.0, "Vdco": 40.242603174599999, "id": 1, "manufacturer": "ABB", "name": "MICRO-0.25-I-OUTD-US-208", "numberMPPTChannels": 1, "resource_uri": "/api/v1/pvinverter/1/", "source": "CEC", "vintage": "2014-01-01", "weight": 1.6499999999999999}, ...]}