Timestep and "system power generated" variable

Hello, 

I just ran a SAM simulation of a system, and am now looking to model the energy savings separately in Excel using the resulting "system power generated variable. My utility interval data is at 15-minute steps and the SAM output is hourly. So to make sure I am lining up the times correctly, I'd like to know - does the "time" associated with each "system power generated"[kw] value correspond to the power generated at that time, or the average power over a time-step ending at the given time? 

Hi Gabriel,

The answer to that question depends on the weather data you use for the simulation. The NSRDB PSM data that SAM downloads by default is instantaneous data at the minute indicated in the weather file (30 minutes past the hour by default for hourly data), so that would result in the system power generated data being instantaneous.



Note that you can use the "Solar Resource Interpolation" macro to convert the hourly data to 15-minute time steps, and that the NSRDB data for specific years is available in 30-minute time steps if that better suits your analysis than the hourly data.



Best regards,
Paul.

Thank you - the solar resource interpolation ended up working well for what I was trying to do.