Sub-Hourly Modeling (for monitoring system performance) in SAM

Is there a (best) way to do sub-hourly modeling in SAM? If not, are there plans to implement this feature?

My application is flat plate PV and I would like to run sub-hourly (1, 5, or 15 minute) meteorological data collected at a site through SAM and compare actual production collected on-site vs. the expected output from SAM given the particular input set of met data. PVsyst has implemented (early stage of development) ways to import hourly met data and statistically analyze performance (actual vs. expected), but I do not believe there is sub-hourly functionality at present.

Many thanks.

P.S. Is there a way I can set up the ability receive an email when my inquiries are answered (while not receiving any additional emails from the support forum)? Thanks again.

SAM's PV models read weather files in the TMY2, TMY3, or EPW file format, which are all hourly formats. For now, there is not a way to run the PV models with a sub-hourly time step. We are planning to rework the weather file reader so that it can read subhourly weather data -- that should be available in a future release.

The physical trough model can run with a special SMW weather file that allows shorter timesteps.

As for website notifications, I don't see a setting on the My Account page to only send notifications for responses to forum topics that you post. I'm working with our webmaster to see if we can add such a setting.

Best regards,
Paul.

Have any updates been made or are any being developed that would change the answers given above?

Yes, things have changed since April 2012! The current version of SAM uses a new weather file format that we call SAM CSV that supports data at any time step up to one minute. SAM determines the time step from the weather file, so if you run a simulation with a weather file that contains 15-minute data, it will run a 15-minute simulation.

Best regards,
Paul.

I would like to run with 1 minute of TMY data received by SolarGIS. Is it possible to run with 1 or 5 minutes of meteorological data?

Best Regards,
Umut.

Hi Umut,

Yes, SAM's solar models determine the simulation time step from the weather file, so if you use a weather file with 1-minute data, SAM will run 1-minute simulations, similarly for 5-minute weather data, it will run 5-minute simulations.

See this topic in Help:

samrepo.nrelcloud.org/help/weather_format_sam_csv_solar.htm

Best regards,
Paul.