Advised workflow

Hi all,

I am new to SAM. My project has me run a simulation of a solar array of a certain size with some specific parameters for around 300 different locations. Of these locations I have obtained the weather files and I want to use the yearly electricity generation output for the projects lifetime found in the Cash Flow tab(I found that only PV Residential provides this data). I have tried using PySAM for this purpose, but I can't figure out how to do it. Is silently crashed and does not give me any errors. I also tried to use the LK scripting in SAM but I couldn't figure out how to make that work. Is changing the weather file possible to automate in SAM? What is a good approach for this? 
Thanks for any tips you have for me!

Version: 2025.4.26
Model: PV>detailed PV model>distributed>residential owner

Kind regards,
Oscar 

Hi Oscar,

The annual total energy is an output of the financial model that calculates annual cash flows. For the Detailed PV / No Financial configuration, there is no financial model, so the performance model (Detailed PV or Pvsamv1 in this case) runs a simulation over a single year. If you need annual totals over the anlaysis period, you'll need to run a configuration with a financial model.

You can find sample LK scripts in the SAM GitHub repository here: github.com/NREL/SAM/tree/develop/samples/LK%20Scripts%20for%20SAM . The  solar-resource-simulate-multiple-files.lk  sample script shows two ways to run simulations over multiple weather files.

You should also be able to accomplish this in PySAM. Please send me a copy of your Python script if you would like help troubleshooting it. You can put the .py file and any accompanying file in a .zip file before uploading it here.

Best regards,
Paul.