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Release Notes

Release Notes#

Version 0.2.12#

  • Fix: the wind turbine power curve is checked for a missing cut-out wind speed and an option to add a cut-out wind speed at the end of the power curve is introduced. From the next release v0.2.13, adding a cut-out wind speed will be the default behavior (GH #316)

  • Compatibility with xarray >= 2023.09.: The chunked spatial dimension in aggregate was raising an error with the new xarray version. This is fixed now.

  • Bug fix: Some wind turbine models did not include a cut-out wind speed, potentially causing overestimated power generation in windy conditions. Cut-out wind speeds were added to the following affected wind turbine models (GH #314):

    • NREL_ReferenceTurbine_2016CACost_10MW_offshore

    • NREL_ReferenceTurbine_2016CACost_6MW_offshore

    • NREL_ReferenceTurbine_2016CACost_8MW_offshore

    • NREL_ReferenceTurbine_2019ORCost_12MW_offshore

    • NREL_ReferenceTurbine_2019ORCost_15MW_offshore

    • NREL_ReferenceTurbine_2020ATB_12MW_offshore

    • NREL_ReferenceTurbine_2020ATB_15MW_offshore

    • NREL_ReferenceTurbine_2020ATB_18MW_offshore

  • Fix: the wind turbine power curve is checked for a missing cut-out wind speed and an option to add a cut-out wind speed at the end of the power curve is introduced. From the next release v0.2.13, adding a cut-out wind speed will be the default behavior.

  • A cutout can now be loaded with setting chunks to auto.

  • The Cutout class has a new function area which return a DataArray with dimensions (x,y) with the area of each grid cell.

  • The Cutout class has a new function layout_from_area_density which returns a capacity layout with the capacity per grid cell based on the area density.

Version 0.2.11#

  • With this release, we change the license from copyleft GPLv3 to the more liberal MIT license with the consent of all major contributors #263.

  • Added 1-axis horizontal, 1-axis tilted horizontal, 1-axis vertical, and 2-axis tracking options for solar PV; e.g. cutout.pv(tracking='horizontal').

  • Added small documentation for get_windturbineconfig

  • The deprecated functions grid_cells and grid_coordinates were removed.

  • Feature: Cutouts are now compressed differently during the .prepare(…) step using the native compression feature of netCDF files.

    This increases time to build a cutout but should reduce cutout file sizes. Existing cutouts are not affected. To also compress existing cutouts, load and save them using xarray with compression specified, see the xarray documentation for details.

  • Feature: Cutouts from ERA5 are now downloaded for each month rather than for each year. This allows for spatially larger cutouts (worldwide) which previously exceed the maximum download size from ERA5.

  • Doc: A subsection on how to reduce cutout sizes has been added to the documentation.

  • Bug notice: An bug in one of atlite package dependencies (xarray) can lead to nan values when using atlite.

    A workaround is implemented in atlite which reduces the performance when building cutouts, especially for ERA5 cutouts. The nan values in cutouts which are affected by the bug can not be recoevered and the cutout needs to be downloaded again. For more details on the bug, see the xarray issue tracker.

  • The exclusions calculation for geometries not overlapping with the raster was fixed.

  • The ExclusionContainer has new functions compute_shape_availability and plot_shape_availability. These functions ease the inspection of excluded areas within single and multiple geometries.

  • Support for newly released ERA5 back extension to 1940.

  • Feature: Added the irradiation method to cutout to access raw irradiation data, as well as the irradiation=total keyword to the TiltedIrradiation method for a way of accessing direct, diffuse, and ground reflected irradiation quantities separately when needed.

    A new example jupyter notebook building_stock_weather_aggregation.ipynb has also been added to demonstrate a use case for the added functionality.

Version 0.2.10#

  • atlite now supports shapely >= v2.0.

  • Bugfix: For certain time spans, the ERA5 influx data would be incorrectly shifted by 12 hours. This is now fixed and influx data is always shifted by minus 30 minutes. See #256 for details.

  • Bugfix: The hydro inflow calculation was relying on a wrong distance calculation in atlite.hydro.shift_and_aggregate_runoff_for_plants. This is now fixed.

  • Add a reference to the PyPSA ecosystem community server hosted on Discord

  • Bugfix: building cutouts spanning the most recent few months resulted in errors due to the mixing of ERA5 and ERA5T data returned from the CDSAPI. See #190 for details.

Version 0.2.9#

  • Enable rasterio >1.2.10. Allows now to use the new rasterio 1.3.0 version.

Version 0.2.8#

  • Bugfix: When creating cutouts using SARAH2 data, an error was previously wrongly thrown if exactly the data was available as input as required. The error is now correctly thrown only if insufficient SARAH data is available.

  • Bugfix: When only adding geometries to an atlite.ExclusionContainer the geometries were previously not opened and an error was thrown. The error did not occur if one or more shapes were included. Error is corrected and geometry-only exclusions can now be calculated. (GH Issue #225)

  • Atlite now includes the reference turbines from the NREL turbine archive (see: https://nrel.github.io/turbine-models/). Available turbines can be consulted using atlite.windturbines and can be passed as string argument, e.g. coutout.wind(turbine).

  • Bugfix: Downsampling the availability matrix (high resolution to low resolution) failed. Only rasters with 0 or 1 were produced. Expected are also floats between 0 and 1 (GH Issue #238). Changing the rasterio version solved this. See solution (PyPSA/atlite#240).

  • Breaking Change: Due to better performance and memory efficiency the method of matrix summation, as well as the matrix dtpyes within shape_availability() in atlite.gis, have been changed. The returned object masked (numpy.array) is now dtype bool instead of float64. This can create broken workflows, if masked is not transformed ahead of certain operations (PyPSA/atlite#243).

  • Bugfix: Avoid NaN values into the hydro inflows

Version 0.2.7#

  • The function SolarPosition does not return the atmospheric insolation anymore. This data variable was not used by any of the currently supported modules.

Version 0.2.6#

  • Atlite now supports calculating dynamic line ratings based on the IEEE-738 standard (PyPSA/atlite#189).

  • The wind feature provided by ERA5 now also calculates the wind angle wnd_azimuth in range [0 - 2π) spanning the cirlce from north in clock-wise direction (0 is north, π/2 is east, -π is south, 3π/2 is west).

  • A new intersection matrix function was added, which works similarly to incidence matrix but has boolean values.

  • Atlite now supports two CSP (concentrated solar power) technologies, solar tower and parabolic trough. See (https://atlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/working-with-csp.html) for details.

  • The solar position (azimuth and altitude) are now part of the cutout feature influx. Cutouts created with earlier versions will become incompatible with the next major.

  • Automated upload of code coverage reports via Codecov.

  • DataArrays returned by .pv(…) and .wind(…) now have a clearer name and ‘units’ attribute.

  • If the matrix argument in conversion functions (.pv(…), .wind(…) etc.) is a DataArray, the alignment of the coordinate axis with the cutout grid is double-checked.

  • Due to ambiguity, conversion functions (.pv(…), .wind(…) etc.) now raise an ValueError if shapes and matrix are given.

  • Atlite now supports calculating of heat pump coefficients of performance (PyPSA/atlite#145).

  • Enabled the GitHub feature “Cite this repository” to generate a BibTeX file (Added a CITATION.cff file to the repository).

Bug fixes * The solar position for ERA5 cutouts is now calculated for half a time step earlier (time-shift by cutout.dt/2) to account for the aggregated nature of ERA5 variables (see PyPSA/atlite#158). The fix is only applied to newly created cutouts. Previously created cutouts do not profit from this fix and need to be recreated cutout.prepare(overwrite=True). * The functions make_latitude and make_latitude_optimal were not converting degrees to radian correctly. This resulted in a wrong calculation of the power output when using the orientation latitude_optimal or latitude in the pv conversion function. We are sorry for inconveniences.

Version 0.2.5#

  • Clarification for ExclusionContainer.add_raster(..) that codes=.. does not accept lambda-functions in combination with multiprocessing.

  • Internal change: We are moving to black for internal code formatting.

  • Fix ignored keywords in convert_and_aggregate(…) for capacity_layout=True.

Version 0.2.4#

  • Fix cutout merge and update for xarray >=v0.18.0 (PyPSA/atlite#147)

  • Set multiprocessing context to spawn for ensuring equal computation across all platforms.

Version 0.2.3#

  • The progressbar used in atlite.gis.availability_matrix is now a tqdm progressbar which displays better in parallel executions.

  • The function layout_from_capacity_list was added to the cutout class. It is a convenience function that calculates the aggregated capacities per cutout grid cells (layout) based on a list of capacities with coordinates, e.g. list of wind turbines.

  • The dask version was fixed to a xarray-compatible versions (see dask/dask#7583)

Version 0.2.2#

This update is mainly due to fixes in the data handling of the SARAH module. If you work with the SARAH data, we encourage you to update.

  • Fixed compatibility with xarray v0.17.

  • Fixed sarah data for dx = dy = 0.05. Due to the float32 dtype of the sarah coordinates, the cutout coordinates were corrupted when merging. This was fixed in the sarah module by converting the coordinates to float64. This also speeds up the cutout creation for more coarse grained cutouts.

  • Fixed sarah data for a time frequency of 30 minutes. This was raising an assertion error as the (new) pandas frequency string for 30 minutes is ‘30T’ not ‘30min’.

  • Fix the regrid function in atlite.gis for target coords which are not having the same bounds as the original xarray.Dataset. The previous implementation was leading to a small shift of coordinates in the preparation of SARAH data.

Version 0.2.1#

  • The regrid function in atlite.gis was fixed. The previous implementation set an affine transform starting at the center of a cell at the origin. The corrected transform starts at the real origin (origin of the origin cell). Further a padding of the extent ensures that all values are taken into account in the target projection.

  • Exclusion Calculation is now possible with atlite (find an usage example at Examples -> Calculate Landuse Availability), Therefore

    • a new class atlite.gis.ExclusionContainer was added. It serves as a container of rasters and geometries which should be excluded from the landuse availability.

    • Cutout has a new availabilitymatrix function which calculates the overlap of weather cells with shapes while excluding areas based on an ExclusionContainer.

    • Cutout has now a affine transform property (rasterio.Affine).

  • Fix resolution for dx and dy unequal to 0.25: Due to floating point precision errors, loading data with ERA5 corrupted the cutout coordinates. This was fixed by converting the dtype of era5 coordinates to float64 and rounding. Corresponding tests were added.

  • Round cutout.dx and cutout.dy in order to prevent precision errors.

  • Allow passing keyword arguments to dask.compute in convert_and_aggregate functions.

  • The Cutout class has a new property bounds (same as extent but in different order).

Breaking Change * Cutout.extent was adjusted to cover the whole cutout area. The extent is now a numpy array. Before, it indicated the coordinates of the centers of the corner cells.

Version 0.2#

Major changes

  • Atlite now requires Python 3.6 or higher.

  • We changed the Atlite backend for storing cutout data. Existing cutouts either need to be migrated with the appropriate functions or (what we recommended) recreated.

  • The backend change also includes some changes to the API. Most notably:

    • The xarray for cutouts is now exposed as Cutout.data

    • The Cutout.meta attribute was deprecated in favour of Cutout.data.attrs

    • xarray and dask can now handle some data caching automatically. If you wish to preload some data before your calculation, you can now use Cutout.data.load() to load all of the cutouts data into memory. (Warning: Requires a large enough memory.)

    • The Cutout class has a new property grid, a GeoPandas DataFrame which combines and deprecates grid_cells() and grid_coordinates()

  • The order of coordinates (indices) for Cutouts changed: x and y (e.g. longitude and latitude) are now both ascending (before: x ascending and y descending).

  • Following the lead of geopandas, pyproj, cartopy and rasterio, atlite now uses Coordinate Reference System (CRS) instead of the old fashioned projection strings.

New features

  • You can now use wind turbine configurations as stored in the Open Energy Database using the string prefix “oedb:” when specifying a turbine, e.g. “oedb:Enercon_E-141/4200”.

  • Atlite now has and uses a new configuration system. See the new section on configuration for details.

  • It is possible to merge two cutouts together, using Cutout.merge

Breaking changes

  • The argument show_progress of function atlite.convert.convert_and_aggregate does not take strings anymore.

  • The argument layout of function atlite.convert.convert_and_aggregate must be a xarray.DataArray.

  • Due to the change of the order of coordinates in cutouts the order of coordinates in matrix passed to convert_* functions

    changed likewise: x and y are both ascending now.

  • Due to the change of the order of coordinates in cutouts the order of elements returned by grid_coordinates() has changed.

  • Due to the change of the order of coordinates in cutouts the order of elements in the attribute grid_cells has changed.

Version 0.0.4#

  • support negative latitudes to PV panel orientation

  • add support for ERA5 back extension to 1950

  • add PROJ>=7 valid ‘aea’ projection string

Version 0.0.3#

Brings a minor bug fix and prepares for the next version jump to version 0.2.

  • Fix heat demand hourshift for xarray 0.15.1

  • Add Travis CI and simplified release management

  • In atlite/resource.py, the functions get_windturbineconfig, get_solarpanelconfig, and get_cspinstallationconfig will now recognize if a local file was passed, and if so load it instead of one of the predefined ones.

  • The option capacity_factor_timeseries can be selected when creating capacity factors to obtain

the capacity factor of the selected resource per grid cell.

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