Changing the Financial Simulation Settings

Summary:

The following article shows you how to change the simulation settings for your organization. From here you can change the utility inflation rate, setback and design settings, simulation years, system losses, among others.

To locate the section go to control > design & hardware > setback & design settings.

From here, edit your current settings preset, or create one.

From there expand the simulation settings which will allow you to change the following:

In this section of the presets page you have the ability to change a number of financial and energy calculations:

Automatically set years to simulate - When toggled ON, the simulation timeframe for the project is based on the maximum module product warranty out of all the system options in the project. The simulation of each system is limited to the corresponding module product warranty. For example, if a project has two system options, system A with module product warranty as 40 years, and system B with module product warranty as 20 years, then the project financial simulations will be calculated for a period of 40 years. System A will calculate solar system savings for 40 years. System B will stop solar system savings after 20 years. 
System A

System B

• Years to simulate - Only visible if years to simulate is not set automatically. This refers to the number of years which the energy and financial simulations will be run for by default. You can change this to a lower number than the default on a per system basis in Studio in order to simulate different systems for different amounts of time. The default value is 20 years.
• Performance Adjustment - This refers to the performance of the PV. When set to 100 the system will perform as designed. When set to 90 it means you are accounting for an extra 10% losses. When set to 110 it means you are enhancing the system by 10%.
• Utility Inflation/Price Inflation Annual - This refers to the yearly inflation from the utility for the value the customer is paying. This is used for financial calculations. By default, it is 3% p.a.
• Feed-in Tariff Inflation - This refers to the annual inflation that will impact the feed-in tariffs used in OpenSolar.
• Usage Adjustment after sale - This field allows you to model the customer's energy use amounts changing after the solar sale. This is done on a % basis and applies each year after the solar is installed.
• Discount Rate - This refers to the discount rate used for financial calculations, the default value is 6.75%. This is used to reflect that a dollar today is better than a dollar a year from now. We use it for calculations like NPV (net present value) and ROI (return on investment) to calculate a single number that reflects a stream of cashflows over time. A bigger number in the discount rate means that future benefits are treated as being worth relatively less than if there is a smaller number
• Energy production calculator - This is the default calculator that will be used for all project calculator.
• Weather dataset - OpenSolar uses weather to be able to compute the monthly projections of the system. For this, we use the weather dataset. 
• Losses: Many losses are hard coded into the calculator being used. On the other and some losses can be manually adjusted and the fields under the System Advisor Model (SAM) Losses can be used for this.

Once you have finished editing, then ensure that you press the  button at the bottom of the page.