Modify load over time - PySAM/ Solar PV

Hi, I'm wondering if there is any way to modify the electric load over time. For example, if I expect to implement some energy efficiency measures at my site in a few years, can I adjust the load to decrease at Year 4? Is there a clever way to implement this outside of the model? I am using PySAM commercial owned and Third party host/developer models. 

Hi Allison,

The load input is for one year, so there is not a way to provide different load data for different years.

The best you can do is use the Electric Load Annual Growth Rate input ( load_escalation input to Utilityrate5 in PySAM) to adjust the load in each year. The input is an array, so you can use a different rate for each year. You can use negative load growth values to represent annual reductions in the load. For example, you could model a 5% reduction every 5 years like this:

 

The resulting annual load:

 

Note that some annual arrays in SAM are indexed to start in Year 0 and others start in Year 1. In this case the annual load is zero in Year 0.

In PySAM, use an array of length = analysis_period:

Best regards,
Paul.