Battery Discharge Algorith

Hello,
In the recent update to SAM the ability of the battery to dispatch to the grid has been removed. I want to model a discharge target scenario where the battery can discharge to the grid if it has energy left after satisfying the home load.
How do I do this with the updated SAM model. Additionally, is there a reason for removing the battery discharge to the grid functionality?
Regards,
Sreemohan

Hi Sreemohan,

The behind-the-meter battery configurations in SAM were not designed to allow the battery to discharge to the grid based on the assumption that residential and commercial battery storage systems are allowed to discharge the battery to the load, but not to the grid.

A bug in SAM 2020.11.29 r1 and earlier allowed behind-the-meter batteries to discharge to the grid under certain conditions. These were fixed in SAM 2020.11.29 r2. See these issues on the SAM GitHub repositories for a discussion of those bugs:

github.com/NREL/ssc/issues/513

github.com/NREL/SAM/pull/561

github.com/NREL/ssc/pull/568

As the market changes and batteries are more frequently being allowed to discharge to the grid, we are considering modifying the dispatch algorithm for behind-the-meter storage to allow the battery to discharge to the grid. Please see this issue on the SAM GitHub repository for a discussion:

github.com/NREL/SAM/issues/338

Best regards,
Paul.