How to Change the Financial Simulation Settings

This article is in the Control zone of the App.  

 From the Control page, go to design & hardware > setbacks & design settings.

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

Click on the Simulation Settings (Duration, electricity price inflation, incentives) heading.

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.
• Utility Inflation Annual - This refers to the variable which is used for financial calculations. By default it is 3% p.a.
• Feed-in Tariff Inflation - This refers to the annual inflation which 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

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