Our building will have on-site (and dedicated campus) solar PV, and we're using Trane's Trace program for our ASHRAE 90.1 energy model. However, Trace doesn't seem to have one definitive solar PV modeling feature. Here are the two Trace options we found:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xwyVfLv8ZM. This is essentially a hack where you make a fake room and wall to calculate the solar energy, then you convert it to negative electricity.
- A base utility demand can be defined in the plants tab. The demand value can be negative. We can prescribe the input demand as the maximum possible kW the PV is capable of, input as a negative value, and create a schedule that accounts for time of day and seasonal performance.
Are these acceptable methods? If not, what is a better alternative? Merge hourly output data from our Trane model and from PVWatts (https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/)?
