Webinar hosted on March 25, 2021 by the Center for Strategic Policy Innovation

On March 25, 2021, the Center for Strategic Policy Innovation hosted the first webinar in a three-part series designed to help local and county governments (and local NGOs) develop in-house feasibility and modeling capabilities to advance clean energy and energy resiliency buildout within their communities. The webinar focused on utilizing the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s publicly available REopt and SAM tools, and Open DSS, for effective planning, design, and implementation of renewable energy and microgrid projects.

NREL’s Renewable Energy Integration and Optimization (REopt) tool is a techno-economic model used to evaluate the economic and resilience benefits of distributed solar, wind, storage, and combined heat and power systems, beginning with the feasibility stage of project development. NREL's System Advisor Model (SAM) is a techno-economic computer model that calculates performance and financial metrics of proposed renewable energy projects, with the ability to simulate the performance and financial metrics of photovoltaic, concentrating solar power, solar water heating, wind, geothermal, and biomass power systems. In this training, our speakers demonstrated how local governments can leverage their scarce resources by developing in-house capabilities to deploy SAM, REopt, and OpenDSS (developed by EPRI) - all available at no cost - to evaluate renewable energy projects, beginning at the feasibility stage and continuing through to evaluate solar PV deployment and inform potential resiliency/microgrid design.

The program featured a panel of experts from NREL, including Kate Anderson, Nate Blair, and Xiang Li. These speakers reviewed both SAM and REopt for those who are new to the tools, as well as Open DSS, including an in-depth analysis of how these tools can be applied to site identification, feasibility assessments, financial modeling, and system design. Kate Anderson, who leads the Modeling and Analysis Group at NREL, gave an overview of REopt for those who are new to the tool, and Xiang Li, NREL senior engineer, went in-depth on how REopt can be used, beginning with early site identification and feasibility assessment work, and including how the OpenDSS tool might fit into project analysis. This was followed by a presentation from Nate Blair, head of the Distributed Systems and Storage Group at NREL. Nate provided an in-depth introduction to the capabilities of SAM and how local urban planning officials might employ SAM as a tool to help with financial modeling and system design of renewable energy/resiliency projects.