Condition sets
Create and edit condition sets without geometry.
Reviewed
What this is for
What the world does to an array: weather, the far skyline, soiling, availability. There is no tilt, no module and no field segment on this page. A design is what would be built. A simulation is one of each, paired. One design can run against five weather assumptions; five designs can run against one.
The page hangs off the project, not the designer. A condition set belongs to the site.
Steps
- Open Conditions. New condition set starts another named assumption. Two sets on one project cannot share a name - the results matrix puts them across the top as columns.
- A set with no weather file cannot be simulated. The list says no weather. The weather tab says it in a sentence. The results matrix will not offer a run until a year is attached.
- Tabs on the set: Weather, Losses, Models, Mismatch, Advanced, Components. Horizon sits on the page as its own card.
- Weather is the file, which location the sun's position is computed for, the exceedance level, and the uncertainty terms. Weather and P50, P90, and uncertainty.
- Losses is soiling, AC losses, availability, the two degradations, snow and any custom loss. Horizon and loss assumptions.
- Models is cell temperature and how irradiance is transposed onto the plane, the temperature coefficients for each racking type, and the bifacial rear side (albedo, rear shading, rear mismatch).
- Mismatch is irradiance variation, temperature spread, module tolerance and the random seed a clone carries.
- Advanced is design temperatures, tracker limits and backtracking.
- Components is which characterisation a simulation should use when a module or inverter has several.
- The tabs are saved together by Apply, and nothing typed there counts until you press it. Three things save the moment you make them: the horizon, a characterisation picked on Components, and design temperatures derived on Advanced.
- Defaults come from the project's design defaults, or the team's default set of them, not from a global setting. They are this firm's assumptions about the sites it builds on.
- Clone if you want a second assumption that differs in one input. A clone carries the weather file, the horizon and the random seed, or two sets that differ in one input would also differ by noise.
The strip of annual irradiation is not drawn until a file is attached: four dashes under a heading would say nothing four times.
Tips and common mistakes
- Do not put a tilt on a condition set. Orientation is the design.
- Do not put a weather file on a design. The year is the world's.
- A name is a column heading. Names are compared ignoring case and surrounding spaces, so "Sunny" and "sunny " are refused as the same column. Name a set after what it assumes.
- Delete asks you to type the set's name, because nothing brings it back: the set and every run against it go. If a financial model, proposal or storage model is built on one of those runs, nothing is deleted and the message says which.