HOMER Energy Brochures, Videos, and Case Studies

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Short walkthroughs of HOMER Front, the hybrid solar, wind and storage modeling software for utility-scale projects.

What HOMER Front does and how inputs, markets, equipment and results fit together. (1:57)

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This is a short video to explain HOMER Front, the best software for hybrid modelling including solar, wind and battery for utility scale.
Basically, HOMER Front gets the input from the user about energy and market conditions as well as the technology using the project and obtains the best dispatch strategy, and the financial parameters associated to that strategy.
It considers the different applications and markets and the participation on each of them.
The optimal dispatch optimization together with the order of commitment within the different applications and the battery degradation are important and critical components of the evaluation.
The user enters data in HOMER Front considering all the characteristics of the project, the different markets that will be considered like energy, regulation, capacity or time of delivery, the different equipment including solar, wind and the various storage combinations to be compared.
Finally results show the comparison of the different combinations including revenues for each of the markets, the costs of each of them and the financials like internal rate of return or others.
And this allows going to detailed results including evaluation for each of the components and parameters generated by the system, which can be exported into an Excel for further evaluation and refinement of the financial model.

Setting up energy, regulation, capacity and time-of-delivery markets. (1:43)

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Let's take a look into how the application tab works.
There are four different type of markets that can be characterized in the application tab.
Energy market, regulation, capacity market and time of delivery.
In the energy market part, the user can enter up to three different markets.
The Day ahead, the Real time and the 15 minute market which can be added and on top of that, the price strips can be added as a single price strip with a yearly escalator or as a single file with multiple price strips which can be entered with a single CSV file.
The next one is regulation market.
The user has to enter the capacity payments for the different regulation markets as well as the storage throughput to consider activation and the energy settlement revenue associated to that activation.
So the user can enter several different regulation markets.
The next one is capacity.
So user has to enter the payment which can be yearly or monthly for the capacity with the capacity commitment and the times where the capacity will be reserved including the number of events per year when the reservation will be dispatched.
Finally, the time of delivery allows the user to define any kind of contract, like PPAs or others, in which there are prices and obligations as well as penalties.

Configuring coupling, interconnection, technology lifetimes, solar, wind and storage. (1:51)

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The Equipment tab is where the user can enter all the information related to the technology that is going to be used in the hybrid project.
In the configuration block, the AC or DC coupled configuration can be established.
User can select if the battery can charge from the grid or not, interconnection limits as well as any curtailment scheme that can be introduced also as a time series.
This feature is also very interesting.
There is a different lifetime technology, so user can enter different start date and end date for each technology which allows for different combinations of lifetime for wind, solar and batteries.
In the solar section, the user introduces solar production profile and the costs including degradation.
In the wind section, same thing, user introduces the 8760 production profile from a CSV file, CapEx, OpEx as well as the size of the plant.
Finally, in the storage section, user can enter different type of storage.
In this case we are comparing 4-hours and 2-hours batteries.
The batteries are selected from the storage library and can be multiplied by a number of units to consider different powers for comparisons.
User can also limit the number of cycles per day, define the round trip efficiency, the augmentation strategies and finally any additional information like auxiliary loads can be entered for the calculations.

Adding and editing batteries: capacity, temperature, degradation curves, augmentation and converter parameters. (1:23)

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It is well known that battery degradation has a critical impact in the project finances within hybrid projects.
The gradual degradation removes the capacity of the batteries and therefore this has to be considered on the cycling strategy.
In HOMER Front, user can get access to the storage library where a list of available batteries can be increased by adding new components or new models directly by the user.
Each of them can be edited and user has the capacity to introduce all the necessary parameters and data to perform the model properly.
So from general parameters to the functional model, which relates power and capacity, you also have the relationship between temperature and capacity, degradation curves which include the impact of the depth of discharge, the relationship between temperature and lifetime, thermal effects, the augmentation characteristics and strategy, the converter model, as well as any other default parameter that can be considered in the model.

The dispatch optimization, order of commitment and degradation modeling behind the results. (1:39)

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After watching all the previous videos, you may wonder how HOMER Front is performing the simulations.
So if you have seen in the videos, the user has to enter energy and technology characteristics and obtaining the dispatch strategy.
And this dispatch strategy will depend on how the system optimize the participation in the different markets, energy, regulation, capacity or others.
How does this work?
There is a dispatch optimization algorithm which is characterized by this function here.
There are three components, one related to markets, another to the cycling cost and another to the penalties.
With some constraints.
This is optimized on a 24-hours basis, assigning the 24 values for the state of charge as a block.
Repeating this iterative process along the entire lifetime of the project, you will obtain the optimal dispatch strategy every day for the entire lifetime of the project.
It's also important for the system to determine the order of commitment and how each of the participations is organized in terms of arbitrage or reserve or activation.
And finally, as I mentioned and explained within the battery section, degradation is another important component to be able to determine the cost of degradation, the cost of cycling and the best augmentation strategy for the project.