Name: Modeling Solar-Plus-Storage Projects in HelioScope
Uploaded: 2026-08-19T16:16:14.500Z
Duration: 1 h 4 s
Description: Modeling Solar-Plus-Storage Projects in HelioScope

Transcript for "Modeling Solar-Plus-Storage Projects in HelioScope": Good morning, everybody. Welcome to modeling solar plus storage in Helioscape from design to proposal. We are expecting a large crowd today, so we are going to hold for just a moment to give everybody time to jump in. While you're at it, I love seeing where you all are coming in from. We've got people from all over the world, whether that's Vegas and Miami here in The United States, Asia, Lagos, Nigeria, Toronto. Feel free to drop in where you're coming from. We'd love to learn more. While you're in the chat, I wanna give you a heads up. There are two other tabs over there. The first one is called docs, and it has a document that our modeling storage modeling and heli scope expert, Paulina, has put together. So highly recommend you check it out. It has links to a variety of helpful, help center articles that will teach you how to do some of the more advanced functionality that we'll be going over today. As well, we have a q and a section. About halfway through this webinar, a little after, I'm going to be inviting three of the engineers who worked on helioscope storage modeling onto the stage with us, and we are going to talk with them, and ask your questions directly to them. So if you have questions for our engineering team, drop this in the q and a. I cannot promise we'll get to all of them live. The last time we did a webinar, we had so many questions. We couldn't possibly have gotten to them all. But as soon, we'll get to as many as we can, and anything we can't get to live on the air, we promise to follow-up with after the webinar. So hold tight. Get comfortable with the side there. We'll get started in just another minute. Okay. It looks like we've got a good number of people on the line, and I don't wanna hold up those of you who arrived on time. So thank you very much. Good morning, or afternoon, evening, night, depending on where you're calling in from. And welcome to modeling solar plus storage in helioscope from design to proposal. My name is Meredith Jung. I am going to be, one of your two cohosts for today. I'm a staff product marketing manager on Helioscope. I've been here just over two years. Really love working, with Helioscope. Previously came from construction tech and and now in solar. I'm very excited to be here. And with me today, for our presentation, I have an expert in solar, and that is Paulina Rosencrantz. She's our senior customer support manager for Helioscope. She's been here gosh. How many years has it been, Paulina? A little over five years. Five years on Helioscope. And before that, she worked with Energy Toolbase. So we talk about people with the expertise on solar plus storage modeling. Paulina has it, and we're very excited to have her with us to be sharing best practices and tips and tricks as we go along today. Hey, everybody. I'm look really looking forward to chatting with you all today about storage, about Helioscope. Let's get started. Awesome. Looking at today's agenda, we're gonna do a quick introduction to solar plus storage modeling in Helioscope, what's available today, what will be coming down the road as we continue development. From there, we're going to jump right into the live demonstration. We know that's what you're here to see. And then we're gonna open up the Q and A. If you weren't here at the start, there's a little Q and A tab over there on the side next to the chat, and you can type your questions in there. We are going to invite three of the engineers who worked on storage modeling in Helioscope to join us for the q and a. So ask your questions. We'll ask them to them live. If we don't get to all of your questions, we do promise to follow-up after the webinar. But, hopefully, we can get to all of them and get your question answered from one of our engineers. A piece of housekeeping before we get started, this record this webinar is being recorded. We will send the recording out to you afterwards. Please feel free to send that to your friends, your colleagues, anyone else who you think needs to see this presentation. With that, I wanna kick this off today with a poll because storage modeling started with a survey. So I'm going to start with our first question for the today, and that is what portion of the projects that you do preliminary designs for include storage today? Awesome. Let's share those results. Whoops. And it looks like the majority of you are coming in at roughly one to 25% or 26 to 50% today. Sounds about right. We know storage attach rates are relatively low at this point globally, but they are starting to rise. Okay. Let's now, move on to our next question, and that is looking two to three years out, what portion of the projects that you do preliminary designs for do you expect to include storage? So, again, you can vote on the side. I guess a lot of you are voting in the chat. It's fantastic that a number of you are quoting storage on a 100% of your projects because or expect to, because storage really does change those project economics. Oh, look. There are zero votes for 0% as we look two to three years out, and a lot of you are thinking that a majority of your projects are going to be having solar plus storage moving forward. And you know what? That actually matches what we're seeing from what we saw from you in our survey. So if I go forward a slide, these are the results from the survey that we ran last October. That dark red, those are the number of people who are quoting storage today, including it in their preliminary designs. And that purple is what portion of designs they're expecting to include it on in two to three years, and it actually matches your guys' answers pretty well. The majority of you are just getting into storage, but you're expecting to do a lot more in the future. And because of that, we knew that there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled, and that's why we developed storage modeling in Helioscope. Preliminary storage modeling. Right? So this is for your preliminary designs, and it fully integrates storage modeling into the design workflow in Helioscope. So I'm gonna show you how integrated that is, but you're not gonna have to leave the designer to do storage modeling. It's really a game changer in terms of that time chain savings. Pro and enterprise customers will have access to all of our storage modeling features, which will include once we're done with this first round of work, peak shaving, energy arbitrage, and self consumption modeling. And each of these models is coming out as they're ready. Today, available in Helioscope, we have three major features that support this solar plus storage workflow. The first is battery layout capabilities. They're available for all of our customers, basic, pro, enterprise. You can place battery banks, alongside your PV layout in the designer and configure that bank size and the quantity to match the project requirements. Right? Super simple battery layout. From there, this month, we released peak shaving modeling, which allows you to minimize demand charges by shaving that peak demand. Right? And to see how grid charging impacts that performance and update those key inputs for storage modeling right from the storage simulation panel. And then finally, we've upgraded our metrics bar in the new experience so we can simulate performance and review key metrics without leaving the designer and so that you can update key inputs from the metrics bar as well. And you're going to see all of that in our integrated solar plus storage workflow today. Now there is more to come down the line, and there are three major things that we have coming up in the next six to twelve months depending on how difficult they are to develop. But in the coming months, we're really looking at, three major improvements. The first is energy arbitrage, being able to model the charge and discharge cycles and time those to maximize maximize, minimize energy costs, the ability to optimize battery dispatch as well against time of use rates. Right? That's energy arbitrage. And you've probably seen this in a number of other solutions on the market. Same thing with self consumption, being able to maximize the share of the load that is served, by solar before pulling from the grid. And then finally, we're going to be adding net billing to our support. We know that there are a lot of utility rates and utilities who have gone to a net billing tariff model that will be coming out in the coming months, somewhere between energy arbitrage and self consumption. So you can expect to see all of those, in the coming months. With that, I have talked a lot. You are here to see the workflow, so let's get into the software. I am going to share my screen. Paulina is going to jump in with tips and tricks, best practices, things that you need to know as we go through. So let me stop sharing. Apologies. My controls are taking a moment here and get us into Helioscopes. By the way, saw a quick question pop up in the chat that we'll answer real quick. Net billing tariffs and all of our utility rate capabilities are available globally. So, it's really about, giving you the ability to set that all up. Check out the docs. There's an entire article that Paulina included in there on how you can set up custom utility rates. Okay. Let's get into HeliScope. So this is HeliScope new experience for those of you who maybe haven't been in the software lately or have not made the move from classic to the new experience or are new and considering a trial. Welcome to all of you and, of course, to our existing customers on the new experience. Welcome home. From here, real easy for us to go in, start a new project, or come through and sort, filter, and search for our projects. Today, we're going to jump into this one. You'll notice I've got a variety of designs already set up for this project. Now we can go through and look at the details for any of these designs. We've got one here that's already got the battery bank on it. But I'm gonna go ahead and make a new design for us so we can get started from scratch, and I can show you just how quickly we can get from design to proposal, in heli scope for a solar plus storage project with, of course, the brights for the tips and tricks. So I'm going to turn on LiDAR real quick so we can take a look at this building, and you'll notice that we've got a bit of a slope on this rooftop. So as we go to model this roof, we're going to wanna make sure that we do two field segments so we can capture that slope accurately. So here's gonna be our first one. Quick click. By the way, if you're not using shift click to get those 90 degree angles, highly recommend it. One of my favorite keyboard shortcuts in the software. I'm gonna right click. We'll set that agile module azimuth. And you'll notice over here on the left that because we used a profile, we preloaded our modules out of the 10,000 modules in our library. I've preset the racking, and I've got a number of other, things that were preset for me. This particular module is bifacial. That's something we released last summer in case you missed it. So I'm gonna put a racking height here so we get that bifaciality. And then I'm going to add independent tilt, and we'll use lidar to get the tilt on this rooftop. Before I do that, though, I'm just gonna do a quick copy paste so that we can put this on the other side. Yeah. That was a nice control v. Quick and easy. And then I'm just gonna right click and fit to lidar. So there's one. Here's the other. So this is the one we were working on first. Here's our second one. If we go and we turn this sideways, you'll notice we've got a clean rooftop here. We'll turn on lidar. We'll give LiDAR a second to load. Sometimes Google Sunroof likes to take its time. While that's loading, you probably noticed, right, we've got a different module, azimuth and tilt, from surface azimuth and tilt. That's the beauty of Independent Tilt. This feature, along with all the features you see today, are available in Pro Plan. I will mention if anything is enterprise only, but for the most part, everything you see is available in Pro Plan. So a good chunk of it will also be available in basic, but storage modeling itself is a Pro Plan feature. Okay. With that, let's turn on LiDAR. Oops. And it looks like that LIDAR recalculated once we did that. It happens sometimes. So we just refit to LIDAR, and now we've got a clean rooftop here. Okay. So we have laid out our field segments. We can do some tweaking to make them more accurate. But at this point, in the interest of time, I'm going to turn off our array, turn off LiDAR, and jump in to create the obstructions on our rooftop because this is the part that you all know, so I don't wanna take too long here. So here's our skylight. Last year or two years ago, we released similar obstruction detection. That's Aurora's AI technology in Helioscope. Last year, we expanded that technology to our Pro Plan customers. So I'm gonna fit this to LIDAR, and then I'm going to use detect similar keepouts to use a max mix of computer vision, lidar data, and, just general AI from Aurora to find all of the skylights on this roof. So we've made our skylights real quick. And then as well, let's go ahead and get this, vent roof vent here. We have a new circle keepout that came out this year in case you missed it. So now we can go like that. Again, we'll create a setback. I will use lidar once again to size this. And now that we have that size, once again, we can use detect similar keepouts, and it will find all of the roof vents on this roof. So we'll pull that out. Five created. Zoom back out. So you can see it created all I like to zoom in up here because it created all of the roof vents that are this sort of short stubby roof vent. But for these tall long ones, it realized they were different and then create them. If I wanted to, I could go in, create the rest of the keepouts for this rooftop pretty easily. But in the interest of time and spending as much time as possible on storage in the q and a with our engineers, we're going to call this rooftop complete, turn back on the array, and move on to our last step before we get into our storage design work, and that is making sure we've got our electrical set up. Again, I've used a profile, so the inverter is already set for this project. But you can come through, select from over 10,000 inverters in our inverter library, and make some other changes. I'm not going to dig into electrical today, but you can find out more in the doc that's in the docs panel. With that, we have a complete design, and it's ready for us to simulate. And that metrics bar I was telling you about allows us to simulate production without leaving the designer. We can make changes and resimulate production as we're going along, see those updates as they happen. While I'm simulating production here, I'm gonna open up this panel, and I'm gonna turn it over to Paulina to talk through the different settings that are being taken into account in this, production estimate here in the metrics bar, and how you set these up. Thank you, Meredith. So as you see here in our redesigned metrics bar, we've added the ability to adjust the assumptions that have been used to calculate the outputs of the project within the designer. So you don't have to leave this page, and you're gonna see a few different inputs that we have. So the first one is a condition set. A lot of you are already familiar with it, but it basically describes the environment around your PV system. These are things like weather conditions, bifaciality, production probability, mismatch, shading patterns, and losses. Next, you're gonna see your utility rate. So in there, you can select the utility rate that applies to your project. You can also create your own utility rate as Meredith was mentioning. Also, reminder, on that document that we're sharing with you, we have several help center articles, and we'll have a detailed guide on how to create your own rate schedule for accuracy. Now after you select your rate schedule, you're gonna be able to adjust the load profile. That is just referring basically to consumption. Here, we give you two options. We're gonna dive into more detail later, but it's also included within the document. We have the ability to monthly consumption. We can enter the consumption month by month as you see here, or you can upload interval data. Here, we take a different types of of files, like CSV and XML, and that will ensure the accuracy of your project. And then last but not least, you're gonna be able to edit your financial configuration, which is related basically to the economics of your project. So you're gonna be able to set financial inputs like payment method, incentive, cost. And, with that, I'm gonna pass it back to Meredith to continue with our demo. Awesome. Thank you, Paulina. And as Paulina likes to tell me, if you get all of those set up correctly, you will get a correct model of this rooftop. You might have noticed, these numbers updated as I changed that utility rate and load profile. When we went from the set ones where we, had an offset bill that was closer to, 16% using the PG and E demand tier, versus when I set a manual rate and that offset bill was considerably higher for this project. So these inputs really matter, and they're especially gonna matter as we get into storage. So at this point, we have created our solar model roughly, what, ten, maybe fifteen minutes total. We, at this point, could go out and pull our proposal out of the proposals, get our eighty seven sixty report out of the reports tab, and we'd be done with this project. But today, we're modeling solar plus storage. So let's get into the storage tab. And for your projects, the first thing you're going to do is add your storage. That battery is going to show up automatically at the point of connection. You can, move it wherever you want. And then you're going to set up your battery, put in the specs for the battery bank that you're looking at. I'm going to have Paulina talk through what these settings are, how they work, and why they're important. Thank you. Now a reminder, even if you're just working on the early stages of your project and you're just trying to determine if the storage system is a good fit for it, we still recommend you to enter specs of a real battery so the assumptions in the simulation are accurate. So we're gonna go through all the inputs that you see here on your screen starting with description. Here is just pretty straightforward. You're just gonna enter the name of that battery, then we move to capacity, and that just represents the total amount of energy that the battery system can store. This is measured in kilowatt hours. And know that at the moment, the minimum capacity is 10 kilowatt hours, and the maximum is 20,000 kilowatt hours. Now moving to the power rating, this is the maximum rate at which the battery can charge or discharge. This is measured in kilowatts. Then we have the max charge power. This is the maximum rate at which the battery can be charged. This is also measured in kilowatts, and this may be the same or lower than the discharge power rating depending on the system's design. Next, we move into the minimum state of charge of your battery. This will be the lowest state of charge. This is the number expressed as a percentage of energy capacity that the battery is allowed to discharge to. And this is a buffer that we're using to protect our battery health. Next, we have the max state of charge. This is the highest state of charge expressed also as a percentage of energy capacity that the battery is allowed to charge to, a buffer to prevent degradation. Next, we have the run trip efficiency, which is a percentage of energy that can be retrieved from the battery. This is relative to the energy put during charging. And keep in mind that losses occur during conversion. Right? We have resistant, thermal effects, so your run trip efficiency will be less than a 100%. And our last input on the screen will be account, which is just basically the number of batteries that we can include within our battery configuration. Awesome. Thanks, Paulina. Now you'll notice I filled this all out. Those of you who are on basic plans will notice that you only have the first couple of fields. That's what you need, essentially to build out your bill of materials. But for those of you on pro enterprise price plan, you will see all of these fields. And then on the right hand side, you will see this storage simulation panel, which you can quickly toggle on and off. Today in storage simulation, we see peak demand shaving, but in the future when energy arbitrage and self consumption are available, you will also see them here in the storage panel. Peak shaving configuration uses MREL's PI SAM model, and you have the option of letting that model, of course, process through helioscope, generate peak targets based on your consumption file, or you can specify peak targets yourself, either sending them all to a specific, target kilowatt or percent of peak or sending them individually. I am not going to set monthly peak shaving targets. I find that the system generated targets work really well for this particular design. In addition, you have the ability to support grid charging the battery. This is off by default as most jurisdictions or, utilities don't allow grid charging the battery. But if your utility does, you can toggle this on to see the difference between, peak shaving with grid charging on and peak shaving without. Something to consider is making a copy of this design, and doing one with grid charging on and one with grid charging out and doing a quick comparison. I'll show you how to do that comparison when we're done here with this modeling. And then down here, you'll see all of those inputs again that are going into our production, or, sorry, our peak shaving calculation. We have our production simulation. Right? We also have the financial model, which I have preset for this project. And then we have that consumption file and the utility rate, that we have chosen. And Pauline is gonna talk us through why we got error messages here and what we wanna do about them and why it's so important that, we change them. As you see in your screen, there's a warning for consumption. We'll suggest you to edit it or upload your own consumption for more accurate storage simulation results. So here we support two options. The first one will be monthly inputs. By default, we're setting that data for you. For The US, we're using data source from the Department of Energy, and they collect interval data from project locations. So we're also setting that default to residential building. You can adjust it at your own monthly value, select a different type of building. But for all our countries, we're adding, a flat consumption profile set. Now the second option that we give you is the one that we recommend you to use if possible, which is to upload your own CSV or XML file. This will be great for accuracy, and this type of interval data will show you in a detailed way how your customer is using energy. So if you can get fifteen minute data, even better. But before uploading it, please make sure that format is matching our accepted format. You can check our help center articles. We're sharing that in the docs, tab with you just for more information. Next, we're gonna see utility rates. Here, you're gonna see an another warning message. We're just trying to let you know that you still need to configure your utility rates. So we wanna make sure that you're creating and selecting a rate schedule that matches your customer's current charges, including any applicable energy demand charges, any compensation for exports if they apply to your project. So this is an accurate representation on what your customer is paying for electricity today, and this will increase the accuracy of your savings calculations. Awesome. Thanks, Paulina. So we have our uploaded consumption file. I went with fifteen minute interval data, but we could do 30 or 60. Paulina tells me fifteen minutes does the best for peak demand shaving. So I made sure to get a fifteen minute, interval data for this, warehouse. In addition, we've set our utility rate, specifically the PG and E rate with demand charges that, unfortunately, this building falls under. It's crazy. And we're gonna calculate peak shaving. So, Helioscope is going through again using that Emerald Pisam model that it's based on and calculating that peak demand shaving. When it's done, it is going to show us the original peak, that new shaved peak in our annual bill savings here in the storage panel. And then across the top, it's going to update the offset energy, offset bill, and payback period. We'll give that just a moment. There you go. You see it took, what, maybe thirty seconds? Pretty quick. Still loading all of that data, but you can see that we're saving about $500,000 a year, with our new shave peaks. And that offset bill is pretty, impressive gain. We were at 16%. We're now at 56% on the offset bill. So we've jumped that quite a bit, and our payback period has dropped significantly down to five point four years, which is a payback period that would probably make this project pencil out. We can, of course, compare with and without that storage simulation. So we can turn it off, and we can see again what that was before the storage simulation. Turn it back on. I'll have to recalculate. But before I recalculate, let me make some changes to to this design because one of the things that we do in Helioscope, one of the reasons customers tell me they love Helioscope is just how easy it is to update the design. So maybe we want to change that row spacing to four feet. Oh, maybe not 43 feet. It's a little much. So we'll change that row spacing, and then we'll come back through and we will simulate again. And you'll notice as I open the storage panel that we are resimulating not just the production estimate up here on the top, but it's also resimulating the peak shaving calculation. So everything's automatically built into that button as you're making updates to your projects, as you're on the fly trying new modules, right, or, moving things around, you get into the site, you realize that there's this huge obstruction that wasn't captured, in the imagery that was available. Right? You can make those updates and automatically calculate what those changes are. At this point, I'm gonna take a quick break from this while it resimulates, and I am going to turn it over to Paulina again. Let me grab our slides so that she can talk about a couple of the best practices for making sure that your project is set up to, ideally model solar plus storage. Absolutely. Just a reminder, your model will be as accurate as the inputs you're adding to Helioscope. So a couple of things that we wanted to remind you of is please make sure you're modeling your site your site precisely. Use high resolution imagery. Avoid skewed imagery of angled views. Make sure you're capturing every single obstruction on your site, any trees, adjacent buildings, any rooftop equipment or obstructions that might shade your array. You can leverage tools like lighter like Meredith showed you before. Also, make sure you're selecting the right equipment, the modules, the inverters, add the specs for that battery that will match what you're gonna install. The correct weather file is also critical. You might be in a location with a microclimate, so make sure you're selecting a weather file that actually reflects that. And then also some additional, inputs that shape the numbers. As we talked about, interval data, very important. If you can get your hands on fifteen minute data, even better. Make sure you're setting up the right rate schedule, any compensation for experts as well. And your financial parameters, so make sure you're adding the right payment options. If you have a loan interest rate, you set up your discount rate, any cost, interest rate. Anything that's gonna shape the economics of that project, make sure you're adding it to Helioscope so you can get an accurate modeling. Awesome. Thanks, Paulina. Okay. So I'm gonna share my screen again. You can see our simulation is completed here. Within Helioscope, we now have our updated annual bill savings as well as our updated offset energy and offset bill and an updated payback period. So all of that, right, is updating dynamically as we make changes to our project. I am going to now save and exit this design. Our design is complete. We just need to finish the last few steps to get us to our proposal and, of course, our 8760 production report. Back here on the designs page, I can quickly do a comparison of designs. So I've made a couple of changes, which mean I may have to resimulate some of these designs to get that comparison. But I can come here, look at design four, which has our battery, and then we can look back at design two, which does not have a battery, and do a quick comparison of these two designs and say which one of these might be better for our client. So we get that with that metrics bar up here. In addition, for any of these designs, I can pop in to see the details. I mentioned that to you earlier. I we can also do a number of exports. The most obvious one is CAD. A lot of our customers are taking these designs directly to AutoCAD. But in addition, for enterprise customers, they can export these files to PB Assist. We know larger projects, especially since since our enterprise customers can do projects up to 30 megawatts. Some of those larger projects do require a PVsyst eighty seven sixty production report for financing. So this export makes that easy. We can also grab our single line diagram, DesignMinder, or bulk download all of it right here. And at any point, you can click the little three dots if you see them throughout the interface, and they'll have a number of other actions that you can take on different types of files. With design form, I'm gonna make sure that is selected as we go through the next couple of pages. I just wanna go quickly through this left bar. These are those inputs, some of which we've already set up, some of which I preset. So the conditions is something that I preset. To give you a quick look, when you come into conditions in your condition set, you can come into edit it at any time. When you come to edit, you choose your weather data file, right, and your weather sources. And then you can determine whether you want to do, probability distribution. These are p 90, p 95, and p 99 values typically used in The US. As well, we've got a variety of losses. We've added new ones this year. So if you're used to soiling losses in Helioscope, you can also now add snow losses, system derates, light induced degradation, and other, types of energy losses directly to your condition set. You can choose your model. We're using Sandia today, and then you can set up your bifacial modeling. I mentioned that we were using a bifacial module for this particular project. Right? We've set our albedo values for that as well as all of the other information. And more on how to set up your condition set accurately and make sure that you're getting the most accurate, production estimate possible is available in that document that Paulina put together. Energy usage is where you can preset your utility rate and consumption file before you start designing. So that's an option if you wanna do that in advance instead of doing that from the designer. And then here on reports is where we see all of our simulations. If you have a project that's changed since it was last simulated, you can resimulate here. And then you can click on any one of these, yellow bars to open the eighty seven sixty report for that particular project. So here's the production report for the project we just made. Couple of things I wanna point out. Let me zoom in a little because that text is so small. I don't know about you, but I'm wearing my readers. So as we come through, we, of course, have all of our assumptions laid out, the annual production impact, and then we've got our production report with our design build materials that includes our battery bank that we just added. It here's our production probability that we set up. And then finally, down here at the bottom is a new storage only page. It only shows up when you have storage on your design and includes information on the system and dispatch and then these lovely charts showing consumption by source and the monthly peaks and how much solar plus storage has shaved that peak demand for customers. So this is a really valuable, report to be able to use, especially in the sales process and, of course, with your financiers if they need it. Here in financials is where I preset my financial model. Okay. So before I did this project, I set up my financial model. You can go to any of these models anytime to edit them. But you'll see here's our payback period. This is based off of the setup that we have so far, which assumes that this is a one megawatt or higher system and has a price per watt for that. And it also has our battery bank enabled, and we've added a replace equipment replacement cost at year fifteen. And I'll show you how that shows up in the proposal in that cost cash flow analysis. If you are using any of our default, templates, like this default cash purchase, I highly recommend that you go through to the model. Again, instructions are in that doc, so that you can add in a fixed cost place where you can put in that battery cost, because that is a pretty important cost to capture as part of your proposal. Going back to our sample tiered financial model, which has that battery cost in it. Give it a moment to load. Last but not least is our proposals. Right now I'm just showing the default commercial proposal and the Helioscope pro commercial proposal that I've created. If you go into templates, we have proposals in a variety of languages, that you can use as default proposals and customize to work for your company. You can choose your financial configuration and the simulation, that you want to use at the top. Once you have those set, when you click into the proposal, you get the proposal for that specific output. You can download it, by the way, using that download report button or up here. And as you come through the proposal, I'm just using the default. I haven't done a lot of changes, but I wanna show you what storage looks like here in the new cash flow analysis table that came out in May because it's pretty awesome. So this is a storage only page. There are widgets for all three of these things, and I went ahead and just set this up. I right click the page, and it now only shows up on my solar plus storage projects. So we've got our battery bank information, and we have both of those charts that were in the production report to show to our client. In addition, this new cash flow analysis table is included by default in all of our, proposals. And you can see it gives a really detailed analysis of that cash flow. We actually developed this in conjunction with one of our financiers, to make sure that we're providing the right level of detail for those bankable production, for the proposals to be bankable just like our production reports. So know that we are working closely with financiers just like we work closely with you, with, independent engineering firms, and others to make sure that we're providing an accurate solution that meets your needs as you go through. With that, I have taken far too much of your time, and you all are here for q and a with our engineers. So I'm gonna stop sharing my screen, and I am gonna have, Paulina go through and introduce our engineers for us. Absolutely. Please welcome Zach Breslau, Ray Hickey, and Doug McMorris, the engineers behind Helioscope Storage Modeling. Zach, Ray, and Doug, thank you so much for joining us today. To kick things off, I'll start with a quick couple of questions before we dive into questions from our audience. So first, we would like to know if you can share a little bit about your role in the storage modeling project. Maybe we can get started with Zach. Sure. I am the engineering manager on Helioscope, and my role is probably a project manager for this project. And so coordinating with engineers, making sure they have everything they need, and bringing this to life. To Zach. Right? Hey. I'm Ray, senior engineer for Helioscope. I, was working on the service that provides the the actual dispatch to Helioscope and working to integrate it with Helioscope and and, financial calculation as well. Think? you're right, Doug. Yeah. I'm a staff engineer on the with Helioscope, and, I was work worked primarily on the design of the service, integration with Helioscope, as well as, integration with the underlying modeling structure and deployment of of the service. Thank you. Question number two. What's your favorite thing about working on heli scope? We can maybe go in the same order. Sure. Well, as someone who loves to build things, there's there's no better challenge than working in in in solar. These are these are fun, hard problems to solve, and I love doing that with, smart people like Ray and Doug. And so, you know, every day is a joy building these these these complex solutions. Yeah. I feel very similarly. It's, it's very cool to be solving interesting and, in my opinion, important problems. So, happy to be doing that every day with Elitesco. Yeah. I'd echo that as well. And just seeing, the scale of what some of our customers you're doing with Helios scope and what's possible and helping enable that, just very fulfilling. Awesome. Thank you all for answering those questions. Now we're going to transition to our audience questions. So Meredith, you can start with with the first one. Yes. Happy to get started with our first question here. So I'm going through the question panel, trying to pull out as many as we can. You guys have so many questions. I know we won't be able to get to them all. But to get us started, can you guys speak a little more to the PI SAM model that you're using for peak demand shaving and how it works? Where are you gonna take that. one? Yeah. Yeah. So the Python model is a fairly well established model, built by NREL or now NLR, I suppose. And it's it's a pretty straightforward dispatch that just tries to minimize the peak consumption. And it does that in a very efficient way. So that's why we encourage people to upload high resolution data. It will do a better job with higher resolution. So I'm not sure if there's more specifics. I'm happy to answer any any details, but I don't wanna dive too deep. I know there's a lot of questions. Awesome. Thanks. I'll turn it over to Polly to ask the next question. Why don't you have a library for batteries? Yeah. Good question. You know, with the the long life cycle of of CNI projects as well as the amount of innovation that's happening with batteries, we we felt, you know, allowing users to just enter the specs would provide the most flexibility. And I I mean, that that is exactly why we've done it at the moment, but definitely exploring potentially if we if we need to build upon that. By the way, Thank you, you guys. have feedback for the product today as we're going through things that we don't do today, please send those to support@helioscope.com. We'll make sure that those get forwarded on to our product, and engineering team. Okay. One more, here specifically about the 10 kilowatt hour minimum. Is there a reason for that limit, and, will that be changing? Yeah. So the 10 kilowatt hour minimum was in place, just to ensure that we had accurate results from PSAM. We're actually looking to reduce that, significantly, by adding our own, sort of code to scale the batteries appropriately down to smaller sizes and be able to produce accurate results from the storage dispatch. So look for something soon on on that. Awesome. Paulina, do you have the next question pulled up, or do you want me to grab another one here out of the q and a? Yeah. You can grab it. Okay. I noticed there's a couple of questions here about c rates. In the battery section, is it possible to add the numbers of cycles, like one c or two c? So the the c rate falls out of both the capacity and the power rating spec. So the the c rate is the capacity divided by the power rating. So if you want a point five c battery, you put the capacity. That's twice the power rating. Awesome. Thank you. Another one here as I'm digging through, There's several questions, specifically related to Energy Toolbase, that have come up. One, of course, is about, integrating with Energy Toolbase. And just an FYI, we do integrate with Energy Toolbase. So if you've not checked out that integration, highly recommend you take a quick look. But along with that, a number of these questions have been asking specifically about a feature that ETV does really well, which is, being able to paste interval data instead of having to upload a file. Is that something we've considered are considering? I know we don't do it today. We have we have not looked into that, but that that is some great feedback, and and definitely would be interested to learn more about, like, what format you would wanna paste in. And so, like like Meredith said, definitely share that with our support team because that's that's the kind of information we're looking for. Awesome. We've got a couple of questions as well here about, self consumption, related to self consumptions. Like, if we have a client who would like to hold back a percentage of a battery capacity for grid outages, is there a way that we should do that? Is there a way we can model that today? Maybe, like, saying the stock minimum to their desired percentage or something. Yeah. Exactly. Setting an SOC minimum, if you wanna hold some for, backup reserve, that's that's the best way to do that currently. Awesome. Pauline, did you find any, I know there's a lot in here, but did you have one you wanted to call out and ask? Yes. Is there a plan to include a battery size recommendation in the future? Yes. We are currently looking into that. Hopefully, we will have something ready soon. But we, yeah, we definitely see the value and, and some assistance there. Yep. So that would be based on your load profile, whether you're allowing grid charging, how much PB you have, etcetera. Awesome. Coming back to interval data, we've got more questions about that in here. I've got two. The first is, do we support five minute interval data? The answer to that is no. So I'll go ahead and answer that upfront. But the second one here is one that I'd love to ask the engineers. If fifteen minute interval data is not available and we only have monthly utility bills, can Helioscope generate or estimate a Yeah. So currently, we have, kinda like you mentioned before, several ways of entering load profiles or consumption data. So, obviously, the the highest resolution, the best data you can get is, from the utility provider in fifteen minute time intervals. If you don't have that, and you can get hourly, that's that's the best next one. We do support load profiles that you can edit the monthly, averages for. Those are based, and, Paulina, you correct me if I'm wrong here. I think those are based based on some NREL profiles. So those do have hour or daily hourly curves, but they are only they're limited to hourly. And so they're not the best represent they aren't gonna be the best representation of peak load, because it's gonna be very dependent on the use case for the specific facility or building. Correct. And those are only available to The US. So for customers that are outside of The US, we don't have those available. However, we do have a help center article where you can create your own interval dataset if you know how the load of your customer behaves. Like, if you know, for example, they have most of their consumption happening at certain hours of the day, we can help you build that interval dataset by following the steps on the article. Awesome. A couple of questions here related to, plans for, support related to time of use systems. I know energy arbitrage is on the road map. You guys wanna share a little bit about, what we're looking at for energy arbitrage in particular or time of use arbitrage as some other software calls it? Yeah. We're we're currently working on that. That'll be the next release, in terms of battery functionality, and that will handle, yeah, complex time of use rates and will do a good job of optimizing your your savings either by, maximizing self consumption. Or if you have grid export enabled, you can even, you know, arbitrage to the grid. Awesome. Thank you. And then, more about the batteries themselves. So a a couple of kinda nerdy questions here. The first is, is there a plan to limit how many times a battery could cycle in a year, to help, you know, preserve that battery? Not currently. That matters more for, like, the energy arbitrage case. And as we integrate more cost modeling, that will fall out of the built in degradation model that is built into Python. So it it factors in the effective cost to cycle as a function of degradation, already. So that will sort of naturally occur, once we support that functionality. Great. So that's already being covered to some extent by the existing model, but it's not something you can explicitly set yourself. Yeah. That's right. Great. Awesome. And then, as well, what type of data related to the battery can we export? And so at the moment, you know, it's pretty much your battery specs, bomb information, every everything you see in that battery bank. We are investigating, and and I suspect pretty soon, we will be able to export some of that dispatch information. And so I'm I'm a leave that kind of vague because we're still working through the details, but we are we are looking into that. Great. Thank you. And then are you able to, modify the chemistry of the battery bank? So, for example, specify whether it's a lithium ion or a lead acid battery at this time. Currently, no. Currently, we assume it's lithium. Specifically, the the degradation profile is most closely aligned to LFP, lithium ion plus phosphate batteries. So it's something we could potentially support if there's enough demand for other alternative chemistries. But that's the most common at at the sizes. we're modeling right now. So for people who are using lead acid for the time being, send that email to support@helioscope.com if that's something that you wanna see supported. We do read those emails. We take that customer input. It's part of why we got on our journey to storage modeling. It's part of how we've prioritized net billing tariffs, which is coming in the next, few months. So please give us all that feedback. It's super helpful to how our team does development today. Okay. There's a couple of questions here around AC and DC coupled batteries. I just realized, that I was not clear. Heli scope storage modeling today is behind the meter, and it is currently oh, Paulina. I've currently blinked. I know the answer to this one. Yeah. So we currently only model AC coupled systems. Thank you. Are there plans to support DC coupled systems? Yes. Long term. And so, you know, we just did peak shavings. And so energy arbitrage, self consumption are next, and then we are definitely gonna be exploring, DC coupled systems. Awesome. Thank you. Here we go. This is helpful. I just filtered to make sure that I'm only seeing the unanswered questions. Oh my gosh. You have so many. We have, like, five minutes left. We're probably gonna need to wrap up pretty soon. But let's pull a couple more here. Just to confirm, we are considering battery degradation. That showed up in a couple of questions here, and we've talked a little bit about that, but wanna make sure that we are all on the same page here. Yes. ISAN has a a pretty robust degradation model baked into it. That considers the the the discharge and the number of cycles as, as the battery ages. Yeah. Awesome. At some point in the webinar, we were talking about a buffer, and a couple of our, listeners wanted to know what is a buffer, and and why would you set one for your battery? I believe that was in relation to the battery settings that we were doing, Paulina, as you were talking through. I can take that one. So the buffer is is useful to protect the battery health. It's similar to any battery you use. Right? You and your cell phone. You never want to fully discharge your battery just so you're protecting the battery from further degradation. So we wanted to make sure that you're aware that that minimum state of charge helps you prevent that degradation and help you from accelerating it while using, charging, and discharging your battery. Great. Coming through, we've got quite a few, questions, related to degradation that we've been talking about as well as a number of questions related to battery sizing, which we've also talked about already. Okay. Oh, here's a good one. How does the battery storage modeling approach in Helioscope differ to that of Aurora? Yeah. So the Aurora models currently aren't targeting peak shaving. And so the primary difference is that, with this first, major battery simulation release, we're targeting peak shaving optimization. So, you know, using the battery to reduce the peak demand, to therefore reduce the demand charges for the monthly bills. And so that's that's the primary difference between what we're doing in Helioscope and what's happening in Aurora. Great. And then my understanding, if I'm correct, right, peak demand shaving is something that is a lot more common in commercial use cases because demand charges tend to be higher and a bigger deal in commercial use cases than they are in residential. But as we start to go into, energy arbitrage, that some of that will actually probably leverage, some of the Aurora technology, if I'm correct, or at least some of the expertise that we already have in terms of energy arbitrage and self consumption on that side of our house. Correct? Exactly. We're definitely collaborating very closely with them and sharing sharing some of the lessons they've learned on this implementation. Awesome. Okay. We have two minutes left. I do need to do a little bit of housekeeping to wrap up. Real quickly before we go, there was also a question of can you use this with gram mount systems, and the answer to that is yes. However, it is all behind the meter. So if that's a front of the meter gram mount system, that will be something that will be done separately. I want to thank everyone who joined us today. Zach, Ray, and Doug on our engineering team, thank you so much for coming to answer everyone's questions. We will follow-up. I know there's a lot more questions here in the chat, and we will definitely need to follow-up with you guys on that. I may also need to tap our engineers for some more technical answers, so we promise to give those to you, and make sure we get those all answered for you. As well, for those of you who already have a pro or enterprise plan, storage modeling is live in your plan today. Go ahead and get started. Storage is right there in the designer in the new experience. So if you're hanging out in classic, take a quick peek, head to v2.helioscope.com. I promise it's it's well worth, the move to get the storage modeling. For those of you on basic plans, we recommend that you upgrade to pro, to get access to this technology today. And for those of you on a trial, you will be able to try this technology out today before you decide whether you're buying a basic or a pro plan or an enterprise plan of Helioscope. Thank you all so much for coming out. We will send this recording to you, in a follow-up email. And, of course, make sure you hit that docs, tab and download that document Paulina put together with helpful links on all the content today. Thank you so much, everybody.