Self-gathered Incentives

Hello,

As a university student researcher, I am surprised and delighted by the power of the SAM. With a team last year, we developed a model for LCOE and other measures for a different renewable energy type, using excel as our base for calculating events and @risk for simulations; it is clear that the SAM is far more powerful.

I just have a quick question: So, do we input the incentives ourselves (such as may be gathered from DSIRE and other sites), or do we draw off of any existing libraries? I did not see such options, so I assumed that was the case.

Thanks!

Conovers

Dear Conovers,

In the current version of SAM (2011.12.2), you have to input incentives yourself on the Tax Credit Incentives and Payment Incentives input pages. We hope to link those inputs to an online database like DSIRE ( www.dsireusa.org/ ) in a future version.

For the residential and commercial financing options, you can use the Utility Rates download tool to populate the inputs on the Utility Rates page with data from the online database of rate structures ( en.openei.org/wiki/Gateway:Utilities ).

Please be aware that SAM does not automatically populate inputs on any pages based on the location you specify on the Climate page. You have to be sure to check the values on the costs, incentives, financing, and other input pages to make sure they are appropriate for your project.

We're glad to know that you find SAM to be useful. Do you have any written materials on your LCOE study that you would be willing to share with us and other SAM users?

Best regards,
Paul.