Hi Paul,
For SAM's Merchant Plant financial model, the time series price inputs on the Revenue page require price data over the entire analysis period, called "lifetime" data in SAM. For the hourly pricing data in your CSV file, you would have to determine how to extend the data into the future. For an analysis period of 25 years, you could simply copy the 8760 data 24 times to make a lifetime series of 25 year * 8760 hour/year * 1 hour/time step = 219,000 time steps. Or you could apply an inflation or escalation rate to the 8760 data to calculate the out-year prices.
For the Single Owner financial model, you cannot provide price data as an input, but you can provide a set of "TOD factors by time step" (under "Time of Delivery" on the Revenue page). To calculate the TOD factor for each hour, you would divide the price in each hour by the PPA price at the top of the page under "Solution Mode". SAM then calculates the power price in each hour by multiplying the PPA price by the TOD factors. For this approach, you provide one year's worth of data, and SAM applies the PPA price escalation rate if you want the price to increase from year to year. (Use a negative escalation rate for a price that decreases annually.)
To transfer data from a spreadsheet to SAM, select the column of data in the spreadsheet, copy it, and then in the appropriate window (Edit Array or Edit Lifetime Data), click the Paste button. To import data directly from a file, create a text file with a single column of data. For the Edit Array window (one year of data), include a row at the top for a header. For the Edit Lifetime Data window, omit the header. You can use the Export button to create a sample text file to see what the file format should be.
Best regards,
Paul.
