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This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.
Table of Contents
1 SAM Overview ....................................................................................................................................... 1
2 Software Downloads ............................................................................................................................ 3
2.1 Desktop Application ...................................................................................................................... 3
2.2 Software Development Kit ............................................................................................................ 3
2.3 Open Source Repositories ............................................................................................................. 4
3 Inputs and Default Values .................................................................................................................... 5
4 Performance Models ............................................................................................................................ 6
5 Financial Models ................................................................................................................................... 8
6 Simulation Tools ................................................................................................................................. 11
7 Extending SAM ................................................................................................................................... 13
8 Software Development History ......................................................................................................... 14
9 User Support ....................................................................................................................................... 15
10 Software Structure ............................................................................................................................. 17
11 Software Legal Disclaimer and License ........................................................................................... 18
11.1 Disclaimer for Desktop Application and Software Development Kit ......................................... 18
11.2 License for Open Source Code .................................................................................................... 18
List of Figures
Figure 1. The SAM main window showing the results summary for a wind power system. ............... 2
Figure 2. The Generate Code command on the Case menu exports ready-to-run code from the
desktop application to use with the software development kit. ............................................................. 3
Figure 3. Diagram of SAM’s structure. ...................................................................................................... 4
Figure 4. The Results page showing time series results for a photovoltaic system with battery
storage. This file contains two cases, one for a wind farm and one for a photovoltaic system. ....... 7
Figure 5. The first several rows of the pro-form cash flow for a PPA power generation project. ...... 9
Figure 6. The report generator exports a PDF showing key assumptions and results from a SAM
analysis case. ............................................................................................................................................ 11
Figure 7. SAM's help system includes detailed descriptions of the user interface, modeling
options, and results. ................................................................................................................................. 15