Introduction

One of the main goals of creating Tensor Cloud is to accelerate renewable energy investment. Prerequisite for this is gaining trust and confidence of lenders and equity investors, which requires accurate, easy-to-understand, and standardized simulations. Creating simulations on Tensor Cloud can be done with a few clicks and calculations usually do not take more than a few minutes, even with hundreds of assets included.

You can use simulations internally, to better understand the performance of a portfolio of assets, or you can share them with external stakeholders when seeking investment into one or several assets.

What are simulations?

Simulations on Tensor Cloud are long-term potential futures of the financial and technical performance of assets. The Tensor Cloud simulation engine combines all information you provide us about one or multiple assets, connected PPAs and scenarios to precisely simulate asset performance at 30-minute resolution over up to 40 years.

Simulation types

There are two types of simulations on Tensor Cloud: asset simulations and custom simulations.

Asset simulations cover a single asset and run automatically: Whenever you change the asset itself, or any associated PPA or scenario, Tensor Cloud starts a new simulation run in the background. Every run is stored as a version, a frozen snapshot of the inputs and results of that run. You can switch between versions, name them, and compare their configuration against the current state of the asset on the simulation tab of the asset view page. See the asset simulations reference for details.

Custom simulations on the other hand are created by you, and can include multiple assets and scenarios. You can create new custom simulations from the simulations page under the planning section of the main side navigation. Crucially, custom simulations do not change when you make changes to the assets, PPAs, or scenarios they are based on. They are a snapshot of the performance of the assets and PPAs at the time you created the simulation. Custom simulations can also not be updated, but you can create a new simulation with the same assets and scenarios at any time.

Relationship with other building blocks

As illustrated in the following chart, custom simulations on Tensor Cloud can contain an arbitrary number of assets, each of which are associated with one scenario and one PPA respectively. They are also the only building block that can be shared with external stakeholders without requiring them to create a user account on Tensor Cloud. This allow to share results on Tensor Cloud even with organizations that would otherwise not allow their users to create accounts on external platforms.