GSEE: Global Solar Energy Estimator
July 21, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
GSEE: Global Solar Energy Estimator
GSEE is a solar energy simulation library designed for rapid calculations and ease of use. It can run for a single site with a pandas DataFrame to hundreds of thousands of sites or global grids with xarray Datasets. Renewables.ninja uses GSEE.
The development of GSEE predates the existence of pvlib-python but builds on its functionality as of v0.4.0. Use GSEE if you want fast simulations with sensible defaults and/or its climate data interface, and pvlib-python if you need control over the nuts and bolts of simulating PV systems.
Installation
pip install gsee
To also install the built-in irradiance probability density functions used by the climate data interface:
pip install gsee[climate]
GSEE is also available via conda-forge.
Documentation
See the documentation for more information on GSEE's functionality and for examples.
Credits and contact
Contact Stefan Pfenninger for questions about GSEE. GSEE is also a component of the Renewables.ninja project, developed by Stefan Pfenninger and Iain Staffell. Use the contact page there if you want more information about Renewables.ninja.
Citation
If you use GSEE or code derived from it in academic work, please cite:
Stefan Pfenninger and Iain Staffell (2016). Long-term patterns of European PV output using 30 years of validated hourly reanalysis and satellite data. Energy 114, pp. 1251-1265. doi: 10.1016/j.energy.2016.08.060
License
BSD-3-Clause
Contributors โจ
Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):
Stefan Pfenninger-Lee ๐ป ๐ค |
Iain Staffell ๐ค |
Johannes ๐ป ๐ค |
Tony Yu Cao ๐ |
Jan Wohland ๐ |
Linh Ho ๐ป ๐ค |
Mayk Thewessen ๐ป |
This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!