Forecasting Savings Tutorial

In this tutorial

We will take you through a five-step beginning-to-end process that you can use when forecasting potential savings for your new energy project.

The example we use in this tutorial is a residential rooftop Solar PV project with the following characteristics:

• Residential Home
• Located in Sonoma County, California, USA
• Gave the installer three months of electricity bills: January, February, and March
• Installer is quoting a 3 kW, south-facing solar system with a 20-degree tilt

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If you are forecasting for non-residential or for technologies other than Solar PV, we still recommmend you review this tutorial. Many of its steps are helpful when running a C&I project forecast, or indeed forecasting savings for many other types of project such as batteries, energy efficiency, eletric vehicle or even rate switching. Throughout the tutorial we note and link to additional points that might be revelant to your use case.

The five steps that you will perform in this tutorial are:

• Step 1. Create an Account where you will set up a Site for your potential customer.
• Step 2. Choose a Utility (LSE) and Tariff where you define what rate plan they are on.
• Step 3. Baseline historical electricity usage and costs to determine how much your customer paid in the past and would in the future without your Solar system.
• Step 4. Model your Solar System including sizing and shading options. We will go over what approaches we support.
• Step 5. Calculate Savings to learn what your customer will likely save in the first year and over the lifetime of the system in all its lovely detail.

Let's get started!