Tools of the Trade: Solar Wind Assessment

NREL SAM model

“The System Advisor Model (SAM) is a free techno-economic software model that facilitates decision-making for people in the renewable energy industry.”1

Read the model description and instruction: https://samrepo.nrelcloud.org/help/index.html

Download and install the current version. It’s free, however, you need register to receive a key by email to use the software.

Technologies

The current version of SAM includes performance models for the following technologies:

  • PV

  • Battery storage

  • Wind

  • Concentrating Solar Power (CSP)

  • Solar water heating

  • Industrial process heat

  • Fuel Cells

  • Biomass combustion

  • Geothermal power

Solar simulation

  • Location and resources

  • Module

  • Inverter

  • System design

  • Shading and snow

  • Losses

  • Lifetime

  • Battery

  • System costs

  • Financial Incentives

  • Rates

  • Load

Wind simulation

  • Wind resource: NY

  • Wind turbine

  • Wind farm

  • System costs

  • Lifetime

  • Financial

  • Incentives

  • Rates

  • Load

Bulk simulation

SAM offers some code-based simulation in the samples: https://github.com/NREL/pysam/blob/main/Examples/PySAMWorkshop.ipynb

If you want to learn more about how to write pySAM: https://sam.nrel.gov/software-development-kit-sdk/pysam.html

Understand the weather file: https://sam.nrel.gov/weather-data.html

Further readings

Footnotes

  1. NREL, https://sam.nrel.gov/↩︎