Thanks Mike. That's helpful. We will consider adding the cap in a future version of SAM.
I have a couple of ideas of how you could work around this for now. You could either run a simulation in SAM with the $0.54/kWh incentive, and then from the Cash Flow page in SAM, click Send to Excel with Equations, and manually change the value of the incentive in the spreadsheet and see how it affects the metrics there.
Or, you could run the simulation in SAM with the incentive, and if the PBI payment shown in the cash flow exceeds $5,000, calculate (by hand) a value for the incentive based on the annual output in kWh that SAM predicts so that the resulting incentive is $5,000. Based on my very quick analysis of a PV system in Seattle with 20 degree tilt, it looks like a nameplate capacity higher than about 9 kW results in a PBI payment that exceeds $5,000.
Best regards,
Paul.