Follow the steps below to input the CSV file type into PVsyst. This can be the TMY file or the long-term resource file broken into one year segments as PVsyst can only ingest one year at a time.

1. Go into “Databases”

2. Click on “Geographical Site”

3. Click “New”

4. In the “Geographical Coordinates” tab, fill in the data from your site – coordinates, name, elevation, etc.

5. You then need to get the monthly values from the CSV file. This can be done using a pivot table in Excel. A second option is to simply click on the “Import” button in the geographical coordinates tab – this will insert incorrect monthly values from Meteonorm or NASA, but those can be overwritten later in the process and aren’t actually used in the analysis).

6. Once you have the monthly values and coordinates, etc., filled out, click “okay”

7. Now go to the “Import ASCII meteo file” tab in “databases”

8. Click on the “Choose” button to the right of “ASCII source file”, then select the file that you just created. Select the site name in the drop down menu below this.

9. You can re-name the .MET file right below this, if you want.

10. Next to the “format protocol file” drop down, click on the “open” button

11. Here you should see your ASCII file show up in the bottom window.

12. Select “Sub hourly data”

13. Enter the number of header lines to be skipped – the first line being read in should contain only values. In other words, skip all of the header lines

14. Select “comma” as the field separator

15. In the “Date Format” tab, select “Reference Year” and make sure that the first time interval is selected to be “0…1 hour”

16. Now go to the “Meteo Variables.” Here you can pick the variables you want to import. We suggest importing “Horizontal Global Irradiance” (GHI), “Ambient Temperature”, “Wind Velocity”, and either “Horizontal Diffuse Irradiance” (DIF) or “Normal Beam Irradiance” (DNI) (you cannot import both of these).  You’ll need to select the columns and make sure that the units are in the right format (conversion help between units can be found by clicking the “?” next to "Multiplicator.")

17. Click “okay”

18. Click on “Start conversion”