SSC output of Conversion efficiency from pvsamv1.

First of all,
I would like to thank you Paul for the webinar our team was able to watch. We are successfully using the SSC with MATLAB 2011a, we're big MATLAB fans and it works great. We are able to do some pretty good data manipulation and optimization, so far we wrote a script that optimizes for tilt angle and row spacing and are planning to do many more. I believe it executes much faster than in SAM using the parametric tool where I had done something similar previously. We are trying to do a DC:AC ratio optimization and are running into a problem with the missing output for Conversion efficiency in order to calculate clipping losses. It exists for the sandia model alone, but not for pvsamv1. We can run the sandia model in parallel with pvsamv1 to get these values but we were wondering why they did not appear since they both have the same inputs but pvsamv1 was missing outputs because we would prefer not to run an extra module as it allows us to run faster parametric simulations. Attached are the graphs we obtained before we over-sized, they look pretty nice. We love MATLAB!!



Thanks Paul and everyone else working on SAM,

Jon

Hi Jon,

I'm glad you found the SDK webinar useful for getting started with your MATLAB model.

By "conversion efficiency," do you mean the inverter DC-to-AC conversion efficiency? Unfortunately, Version 28 of the SSC library does not report the hourly inverter efficiency. (The next version will, but you'll have to wait a few weeks for us to release it.) However, in Version 28, you could calculate the inverter efficiency using the hourly_dc_net and hourly_ac_gross output variables (inverter input kWh and output kWh, respectively).

Best regards,
Paul.

Paul,

yes-- i'm referring to "conversion efficiency" in the output of the sandiainv model which does not appear in pvsam1. We tried this and it includes the inverter clipping along with the efficiency model. We are attempting to separate this information since inverter inefficiency shouldn't be included with the clipping losses due to oversize. It appears that the hourly efficiency is available with the sandia model alone, we will attempt to use this in paralell. I was really wondering why it isn't included in pvsam1 since the same inputs exist in both modules.

thanks,

Jon