Automating Wind Location Lookup

Hello! I'm a student who is using SAM for research purposes. Thanks for the great software!

I'm looking to write a script that produces the output power and cost for a wind farm location at any point in the US. To do this, I need to automate the location lookup and weatherfile dowload of location based on inputted zipcodes. I've modified the Sample PV Baseline script slightly to accomplish this task for solar. However, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent location lookup function for wind. The "Wind Resources" input category returns only 4 possible user defined inputs, non of which are related to the zipcode. Yet on the manual page, you can quite easily specify an address.

Can you help?

Thanks!

Also, if possible, could you point me towards where I can find info on the assumptions/modeling/data that SAM uses or makes when it calculates the financing costs? (I.E. how costs of transmission and integration of solar and wind are calculated per state?)

Hello,

The script in the Sample file "SamUL Weather Data Case Study" (in SAM 2012.11.30) shows how to download a weather file from the Solar Prospector website. To write a similar script for wind, you can use that script as a model, and use the URL that you see on the Wind Resource page to see how to format the URL to download files from the wind integration database.

Note that SAM downloads wind data files from different databases depending on whether the location is in the eastern or western United States. The western dataset covers the entire region and the files are complete. The eastern data set contains files for a number of locations, and does not contain wind direction, temperature or atmospheric pressure data, so writing a script for the eastern U.S. would be more complicated. See the Help system for more details and references.

Best regards,
Paul.

Best regards,
Paul.

Those costs are inputs that you provide. We've tried to document the default values and list other cost data resources on the System Cost Data page of this website.

Best regards,
Paul.