“With new updates that make it easier to use and more applicable for users around the world, HOMER Grid is the go-to choice for commercial electricity customers who are facing complex and potentially confusing choices for their behind-the-meter, distributed energy projects,” said Dr.
The software now also includes wind modeling, allowing users to consider the economics of wind in a hybrid system. Following on the solar-plus-storage theme, HOMER Grid is now integrated with the popular solar design programs Helioscope and PVsyst, providing more accurate solar production data along with estimates that are externally verified and are therefore bankable. It also allows users to input residential tariffs for modeling designs and estimating cost savings on small solar-plus-storage systems. The new version of HOMER Grid includes a more sophisticated Tariff Builder to capture the complexity of today’s commercial tariff structures for users around the world. HOMER Grid now makes it easier to more accurately model demand charge reductions, self-consumption, and arbitrage between time of use (TOU) periods.
Today HOMER Energy released important updates for its newest distributed energy design software, HOMER Ⓡ Grid, a powerful simulation and optimization tool that helps solar developers, engineers, and energy and business planners lower the soft costs of developing complex, behind-the-meter, renewable energy projects. This allows you to see the impact of variables that are beyond your control, such as wind speed, fuel costs, etc, and understand how the optimal system changes with these variations.Software updates to HOMER Grid provide powerful, new features to more easily and quickly model commercial-scale solar-plus-storage and other behind-the-meter distributed energy systems. HOMER makes it easy to compare thousands of possibilities in a single run. HOMER lets you ask as many “What if?” questions as you’d like, because you cannot control all aspects of a system, and you cannot know the importance of a particular variable or option without running hundreds or thousands of simulations and comparing the results. HOMER Optimizer™ is a proprietary “derivative free” optimization algorithm that was designed specifically to work in HOMER.
HOMER Pro features our new optimization algorithm that significantly simplifies the design process for identifying least-cost options for microgrids or other distributed generation electrical power systems.
HOMER examines all possible combinations of system types in a single run, and then sorts the systems according to the optimization variable of choice. HOMER simulates the operation of a hybrid microgrid for an entire year, in time steps from one minute to one hour. Depending on how you set up your problem, HOMER may simulate hundreds or even thousands of systems. It will attempt to simulate a viable system for all possible combinations of the equipment that you wish to consider. Originally developed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and enhanced and distributed by HOMER Energy, HOMER (Hybrid Optimization Model for Multiple Energy Resources) nests three powerful tools in one software product, so that engineering and economics work side by side:Īt its core, HOMER is a simulation model. The HOMER Pro® microgrid software by HOMER Energy is the global standard for optimizing microgrid design in all sectors, from village power and island utilities to grid-connected campuses and military bases.