When I enter consumption interval data into SAM is it expecting that this represents data for Sunday, 1 January 2012?
The time convention for simulations depends on the time convention of the weather file. For the NSRDB (TMY3, TMY2) files, the convention is for Hour 1 to be the hour ending at 1 am on Monday, January 1.
This is important so SAM can match the price of electricity for a week day with consumption data for a weekday.
Yes, if you are modeling time-of-delivery pricing in SAM, the weather data and load (consumption) data should use the same time convention.
However, the number of hours (8760) indicates that SAM is expecting a non leap year, but 2012 is a leap year, which suggests that maybe it is not expecting the first day to be 1 Jan 2012, but 1 jan on another year. This woudl materially impact our financial analysis.
SAM assumes that the weather file follows the NSRDB convention, and does not include leap years.
Best regards,
Paul.