Grid Constrained Stand Alone Battery

Hello,
I am trying to model a grid tied standalone battery. The issue is that the meter only allows consumption between a fixed time period: 10p - 8a. I have a load that that requires power all day, so I am trying to size a battery that will supply the load during the window when the grid is unavailable. Both the battery and the load with get electricity from the grid during the times the grid is available. 

I have a few questions:
1. Does SAM minimize bill cost even when using manual dispatch for the battery? If I set the TOU rates during the constrained time window, will SAM deprioritize that time for getting electricity from the grid to the load?
2. If not, do you have any suggestions on how I might go about modeling this in SAM? 

Thank you for your help!


I am currently using the manual dispatch for the battery to only charge from the grid at specified times.

 

Hi Ondrea,

For the manual dispatch option, SAM operates the battery as you specify on the Battery Dispatch page with the six dispatch periods regardless of the electricity rates. If you want the battery to respond to electricity rates, you can manually define the battery dispatch schedule to match the electricity rate time-of-use schedule.

You could define a battery dispatch period from 10 pm to 8 am with Charge from Grid and Discharge to Grid disabled to prevent the battery from interacting with the grid during that period. However, that would not prevent the grid from delivering power to the load during that period.

Another approach would be to use the Grid Outage inputs to specify a critical load of 100% and grid outages from 10 pm to 8 am each day of the year. That would require building a column of time series data to define the grid outage. For hourly data, Hours 22 - 31, 46-55, 90 - 79, etc. would be set to 1 (grid outage), and all other hours would be set to zero (no grid outage).

 

Best regards,
Paul.