Here is a short video based on the tutorial in running PSSE from Python
Transcript
A look at importing Python into PSSE. Have you ever tried to import psspy
into your Python script only to see ImportError: no module named psspy.
That means that Python was not able to find the psspy installation. Even
though psspy comes with PSSE and we have Python installed on our computer.
Python still can’t find it, and that is because Python is a completely separate
program to PSSE.
Telling Python where PSSE is installed
We’re going to need to tell Python where PSSE is installed.
I’m going to import the operating system and system modules. I’m defining a
variable PSSE_PATH which is where the PSSE that I have is installed. Yours
might be different if you are using PSSE version 33, or if you are running 64 bit
Windows.
Python has a sys.path which is a list of directories that it looks in. When
you type in import it looks through every single one of these directories for
the file that you have said to import. So later on where I’ve typed in import psspy
Python will look through all of the directories and finally the one
I’ve appended at the end PSSE_PATH will contain the psspy module.
Tell PSSE where PSSE is installed
We could run this program now and Python would find psspy. However we need to
do one more thing. We need to tell PSSE where to find itself. PSSE is strange
in that we need to set the environment variable PATH. We need to add to the
end of that the PSSE installation path.
I’m not sure why PSSE needs to be told where it is, but your programs will crash at some point if you haven’t done that step.
Finally initialise PSSE
Let’s initialise with 100 buses. We can see that PSSE is in fact running.
That is how you can import PSSE into your python scripts. So that you can run the scripts from inside or outside of PSSE. You’ll notice that I didn’t open up the PSSE application at any point.
If you have any questions about how to solve a load flow with Python, get onto https://psspy.org/ and ask a question (it’s free).