Commercial load profiles in SAM

Are all 16 commercial building type OpenEI load profiles available through SAM? (Here's the building-type reference at the OpenEI page: energy.gov/eere/buildings/commercial-reference-buildings .) If so, where can I specify the building type in the SAM GUI (or via script)? If not, what building type is used in SAM? Thanks!

Dear Michael,

Yes, you can access data for those load profiles from SAM. Here's how:

1. Create a case using the Commercial financial model, e.g, PVWatts/Commercial, Detailed Photovoltaic/Commercial, etc.

2. Click the Macros button at the bottom left corner of SAM's main window.

3. Click the Download Electric Load button to display the macro description and inputs.

4. Read the instructions, and then at the top right of the Macro page, choose a building type. The macro will download the load profile for that building type based on the latitude and longitude in the weather file you specified on the Location and Resource page. (It works for U.S. locations only.)

The load data was generated by running building simulation models using weather data from the NSRDB TMY3 dataset. In SAM, if you use one of the TMY3 weather files from the SAM solar resource library, SAM's simulation results will be from the same data that was used to generate the load data, so will give you the most realistic results, although you can use the load data with weather data from any source.

Best regards,
Paul.

Paul, thanks so much. I'll report back by the end of the week on my success here (or follow-up questions).

Michael

Paul, I'm sorry for my delayed reply. I look forward to picking up this work again and reporting back.

Michael

Paul, I ended up downloading this data from the applicable OpenEI webpage. I really appreciate your help and may extract default usage data from SAM in the future using the approach you outlined.