Curriculum Materials

This page is for information about and links to teaching materials used for academic courses that involve SAM. If you would like to share materials for courses you teach, please contact us.

For links to presentation materials and sample files used by NREL for SAM webinars, please see the relevant Videos page from the website nagivation menu. For example, materials for webinars we have given on modeling PV system are available on the PV Videos page.

The Pennsylvania State University

Solar Resource Assessment and Economics (EME 810) is a graduate-level course for the Renewable Energy and Sustainability Systems (RESS) Program Solar Option.

Course resources for this and other RESS courses are  Open Educational Resources via Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 licensing (per Dutton e-Education Institute at Penn State). Three solar courses are open now for sharing (EME 810, 811, and 812, and AE 868), along with several other key RESS courses are related to policy, technologies, and markets.

University of Wyoming Extension

The following Solar Electric Investment Analysis (B-1291) series was developed by Milton Geiger (University of Wyoming), Eric Romich (Ohio State University), and Benjamin Rashford (University of Wyoming) and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 license (International) with permission granted to "share, copy, and redistribute the material in any medium or format and adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose other than commercial, under the following terms: Attribution  You must give the appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use."

These materials provide information to help agricultural landowners make informed decisions about investing in photovoltaic power systems for behind-the-meter applications. Each part in the series is a short bulletin focusing on one aspect of the decision-making process. The bulletins cover technical and economic topics. Part 6 is an example using SAM.

This series has been also been adapted by John Hay (University of Nebraska).

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NREL is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.