The latest release of HOMER Pro, the leading software for modeling hybrid renewable energy systems, now integrates solar configuration data from HelioScope and PVsyst, two solar system design tools used widely in the solar industry. This important update to software produced by HOMER Energy is a response to the rapidly growing solar-plus-storage market, and declining costs of battery storage.
“For the distributed energy marketplace to really take off,” said Peter Lilienthal, HOMER Energy founder and CEO, “we need many more people who are comfortable with designing distributed power systems that incorporate hybrid renewable energy systems. And that means practical, user-friendly tools.” The updates in HOMER Pro 3.11 aim squarely at the solar industry marketplace by allowing solar designers to easily model the addition of battery storage to their solar systems. HOMER Pro 3.11 complements and expands the capabilities of HelioScope and PVsyst by providing ways for designers to identify economically optimal equipment combinations. The new software release improves the ease of use for non-technical designers.
Throughout its history, HOMER Pro has simplified the process of designing hybrid renewable energy systems by combining multiple engineering and economic factors, simulating the performance of different combinations of equipment, and identifying the most cost-effective or least polluting options. HOMER Pro performs millions of complex energy balance calculations as it simulates hundreds of system designs per second.
With the new 3.11 release, users can incorporate output from HelioScope or PVsyst that represent the engineering details of PV systems, including the configuration of solar arrays, the impact of shading and other obstructions, and wiring schemes. HelioScope and PVsyst users can now transfer their solar output estimates directly into HOMER Pro for more detailed storage, optimization, and economic analyses, such as comparisons of capital and operating costs, and payback times of different system designs. The integration of these popular solar modeling tools with HOMER Pro now provides solar designers with the opportunity to model systems with batteries and backup generators to determine optimal sizes and equipment configurations.
“Not only does this integration provide a great opportunity to use two best-in-class tools side-by-side, it allows users to more easily go from start to finish when modeling a hybrid energy system with solar PV and battery storage,” said Paul Grana, co-founder of HelioScope’s Folsom Labs. “Through this partnership with HOMER Energy, we’re looking forward to working with users around the world to increase the availability of affordable, clean solar energy in all applications.”
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