Connecting SAM to complex storage Excel models

Dear Paul,

Thank you for developing a tremendous asset for the renewable industry.

Currently the (PPA PV) battery storage module of SAM allows for 12x24 dispatch-ability of the battery with the following behaviors: charge from PV, charge 0-100% from grid, discharge 0-100% to grid. I'm modeling a more complex dispatch behavior set for the battery portion of the system (like SAM's residential battery functionalities, but on steroids), and would like it to interact with the rest of the SAM model. When I say interact, I mean push and pull electrons, but also read realtime variables from the SAM model.

I know SAM offers connections to Excel, scripting, SDK, and other model API connections. Does SAM in its current state allow for interaction with my Excel-based, complex battery model? If so, can you point me to documentation how to start integrating my model with SAM?

Thanks in advance,
-Peter

Dear Peter,

I don't think there is a way to completely integrate your Excel-based battery model with SAM at the moment. Can you tell me more about how you would expect such an integration to work? What inputs does your model require, and what outputs does it generate?

One possibility for partially integrating the models is to use your model to generate a dispatch schedule for SAM. The current dispatch schedule is limited to the weekday and weekend hour-by-month matrices and up to 6 dispatch periods, so you cannot control the dispatch at a finer temporal resolution than that. You could use Excel Exchange or LK scripting to read dispatch data from your Excel file and populate the inputs on SAM's battery storage input page.

With an LK script, you could run simulations in SAM to generate PV generation and load profils, pass that data to your Excel file, and then read battery dispatch data back from the Excel file.

To use the SDK, you would write a program in C/C++ or one of the other supported languages (Python, C#, VBA, etc.) and use it to call SSC, which is the library that SAM uses to run simulations. Because VBA is among the supported languages, you could use a VBA script in your Excel model to run SAM simulations.

You can find recordings of webinars introducing these options on the Webinars page , or find more information by searching the website. Let me know if you have specific questions, and I can answer those here.

Best regards,
Paul.

Paul, thanks for your quick reply. I'll have a look at the webinars and think about your questions a bit more! -Peter