The dispatch log allows expert users to understand the HOMER Grid dispatch. They can export a log of dispatch decisions, timestep-by-timestep, or view individual timestep decisions within the timeseries viewer.

Improvements to the time-series viewer will allow expert users to more quickly be able to see the plots that they want to analyze every time and add these to the Simulation Report. This ergonomic improvement will help a user quickly get to the same plot, even with a completely new file and simulation.

For the new HOMER Grid users, v1.4 offers a new Summary Tab and improvements to the time-series viewer.

The Summary Tab is now the first thing that a user will see once the results are calculated. The summary tab shows the most important results for the one, winning (lowest NPC) simulation, compared to the base case. The Summary Tab is designed to be more accessible to new users than the Optimization Results table and Simulation Results table. Commonly, users did not understand that the table was sorted by NPC and that the top system in the table was displaying the ‘winning’ system. The Summary tab is designed to make new users feel immediately successful, give them resources when the hybrid system does not win, and not overwhelm them with tables.

Improvements to the time series viewer are also interesting to new users of HOMER Grid. With default pre-settings of a couple different plot examples, new users will be able to quickly see the most useful plots and understand how the system is operating without having to set up a plot from scratch.