Question About HOPP Resource Files

[mmoulton1]

I recently set up HOPP on a new computer and I ran into an issue when trying to use some of the files from my old setup. The simulations didn’t run because HOPP couldn’t find the solar or wind resource files. I’m wondering if this might be related to a recent update to HOPP. On my new computer, some of the example files work fine, but I get an error whenever I try to use new latitude and longitude values.

Is there a way to check which locations have available solar data in NSRDB or wind data in WIND Toolkit? Right now, I’ve been guessing and checking coordinates, which is inefficient since sometimes only solar or wind data is available, or the wind data is only available up to certain heights. Is there a recommended way to select locations that have both solar and wind data at the heights I need?

Or, if you happen to have a list of coordinates that you know work for wind turbines at a 100 m hub height, and have solar data that would be really helpful.

Thank you so much for your help!

Sincerely,
Matthew Moulton

[elenya-grant]

If HOPP couldn’t find an existing wind/solar resource file, then it would’ve downloaded new files from calling the API for NSRDB and WTK. Here's some things to check or try:

• Check that you copied over your .env file that has your NREL API key and email (from step 5-6 and 8 of the HOPP installation instructions)? Without that file, you won’t be able to download resource files from the API. The examples that are working for you are likely using resource files that are included in the HOPP repository and live in hopp/simulation/resource_files/. The .env file should live in your current working directory and that you're setting your API key at the start of a python script.

from hopp.utilities.keys import set_nrel_key_dot_env

# set your API key if your .env file in your current working directory
set_nrel_key_dot_env() 

# set your API key if your .env file is not in your current working directory
set_nrel_key_dot_env(path='/path/to/file/.env') 

• Check that you're using resource year between 2007 and 2014 as your wind resource year, and years between 1998 and 2022 for NSRDB downloads
• Try to use less decimal places for the latitude and longitudes, round the latitude/longitude to the nearest 2-3 decimal places.

In alternative approach may be to download files from the Wind Resource DataBase (WRDB) viewer and the NSRDB data viewer. These viewers can also be used to check if the locations you're using have resource data. Other options to check sites are:

• To check valid sites of solar resource data, you can use NSRDB’s solar query API call to see what datasets have data for a specific site.
• Most sites within the continental US should work for the wind toolkit download (some data may be missing in mountainous areas).This .csv file has a list of sites from wind toolkit. All sites within the continental U.S. should have data for all the hub-heights for the relevant API call (listed on the wind toolkit API documentation page).