[Easy] What is the annual irradiation for Salt Lake City?

[AdamRJensen]

There surely is no one answer to this question. However, as a first step, one may use so-called typical meteorological year (TMY) data. TMY data are derived based on long-term irradiance data and are meant to capture the median meteorological conditions at a specific site.

Step 1. - Use the pvlib.iotools.read_tmy3 function to read a TMY irradiance file for Salt Lake City. The data is provided by SolarAnywhere and can be found here. Reading a local file on Google Collab is not easy so please skip this step. Apologies.

Step 2. - Retrieve TMY irradiance data from the NREL's NSRDB PSM3 using the pvlib.iotools.get_psm3 function. For this tutorial, you can use api_key='DEMO_KEY' although you still have to provide an email.

Step 3. - Compare the annual irradiance based on the TMY files from the two different data providers/sources.