solaR: Solar Radiation and Photovoltaic Systems with R

The solaR package allows for reproducible research both for photovoltaics (PV) systems performance and solar radiation. It includes a set of classes, methods and functions to calculate the sun geometry and the solar radiation incident on a photovoltaic generator and to simulate the performance of several applications of the photovoltaic energy. This package performs the whole calculation procedure from both daily and intradaily global horizontal irradiation to the final productivity of grid-connected PV systems and water pumping PV systems.

It is designed using a set of S4 classes whose core is a group of slots with multivariate time series. The classes share a variety of methods to access the information and several visualization methods. In addition, the package provides a tool for the visual statistical analysis of the performance of a large PV plant composed of several systems.

Although solaR is primarily designed for time series associated to a location defined by its latitude/longitude values and the temperature and irradiation conditions, it can be easily combined with spatial packages for space-time analysis.

The stable version of solaR is hosted at CRAN. The development version is available at GitHub.

The best place to learn how to use the package is the companion paper published by the Journal of Statistical Software. This book (in Spanish) contains detailed information about solar radiation and photovoltaic systems. In my articles I frequently use solaR.

If you use solaR, please cite it in any publication reporting results obtained with this software:

Perpiñán Lamigueiro, O. (2012).
solaR: Solar Radiation and Photovoltaic Systems with R.
Journal of Statistical Software, 50(9), 1–32.
https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v050.i09

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Article{,
    title = {{solaR}: Solar Radiation and Photovoltaic Systems with {R}},
    author = {Oscar Perpi{\~n}{\'a}n},
    journal = {Journal of Statistical Software},
    year = {2012},
    volume = {50},
    number = {9},
    pages = {1--32},
    doi = {10.18637/jss.v050.i09}
  }

solaR has been cited in several papers.