Cleared capacity Merchant Plant

Hi everyone,

instead of using the Merchant Plant, would it be a safe workaround to use the PPA model with a PPA price =1  and TOD factors by time-step, with the hourly prices for a full year?

Thanks

Hi Alk,

Yes, that approach would model a utility-scale project with power prices that vary by time step.

We recently added a script to the LK script samples that downloads hourly price data from the NREL Cambium database and inserts it to the "TOD factors by time step" input on the Revenue page for the Single Owner model. The script sets the PPA price to the average of the hourly values of the price data and normalizes the hourly price data to the average so that the PPA price input is more meaningful. You can find the cambium-market-price-data-download.lk script here (see instructions at the bottom of the page):

github.com/NREL/SAM/tree/develop/samples/LK%20Scripts%20for%20SAM

Best regards,
Paul.

Excellent! Thank you Paul

Hi,

I have been looking into this possibility but I still have a question: can only one year of data be considered or is it possible to enter TOD as a longer time series of several years?

Thanks

Hi Javier,

The TOD multipliers only cover a single year. The PPA price escalation adjusts the PPA prices from year to year. Unlike the merchant plant method, this method does not allow you to provide time series price data over the analysis period.

Best regards,
Paul.

For updates to battery dispatch for the Merchant Plant financial model in the Fall 2024 version of SAM, see github.com/NREL/SAM/issues/391 .

Best regards,
Paul.