Hi Henry,
We do not have data to determine reasonable default pricing data for the Merchant Plant financial model. For the other financial models (PPA Single Owner, Residential, Commercial, etc.), we use information from the
NREL Annual Technology Baseline (ATB)
and other published cost studies to choose default values for cost and financial assumptions that reasonably represent a typical project in the U.S. Merchant pricing data that can be generalized in this same way is not available. We expect that people using SAM's merchant plant model have access to their own pricing data. We also made a decision not to use the "single value" option as the default to try to make it clear that the model requires time series data over the project life.
Best regards,
Paul.