Update Residential / Commercial Cash Flow to Excel for Battery and Fuel Cell

[cpaulgilman]

Pull Request Template

Description

Modify residential_commercial.xlsx workbook for send-to-Excel with equations:

• Account for battery operating costs
• Account for fuel cell operating costs
• Account for fuel cell value of thermal energy

Send-to-Excel with equations values of LCOE and NPV for default PV-Battery / Commercial and Fuel Cell / Commercial configurations should now match values in SAM metrics table.

Fixes #1403

Type of change

Please delete options that are not relevant.

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to not work as expected)
• This change requires a documentation update
• This change modifies variables in existing compute modules. Please see Checking for PySAM Incompatible API Changes.

Checklist:

If you have added a new compute module in a SSC pull request related to this one, be sure to check the Process Requirements.

• My code follows the style guidelines of this project
• I have performed a self-review of my own code
• I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas
• I have made corresponding changes to the documentation
• My changes generate no new warnings
• I have added tests that prove my fix is effective or that my feature works
• New and existing unit tests pass locally with my changes
• Any dependent changes have been merged and published in downstream modules
• I have checked my code and corrected any misspellings

[brtietz]

I tested this with PV-Battery Commercial and got the OLE automation error 3 times in a row, even after restarting SAM and renaming the file so it wasn't overwriting an existing Excel. Any recommendations for how to kick that error? Is a full rebuild necessary?

[cpaulgilman]

@brtietz I sometimes get an OLE Automation error with Send-to-Excel with Equations, but it usually opens the appropriate Excel workbook and populates the inputs, so it's just an annoyance to have to close the error window. Is it preventing the workbook inputs from being populated for you?

This has long been an issue for any SAM functions that interact with Excel.

[brtietz]

When the error shows up for me, it populates some but not all of the values, which causes things like LCOE and NPV to mismatch (which seemed critical to the review).

[cpaulgilman]

@sjanzou Do you have any thoughts on how fixable this OLE Automation error might be? I had not noticed it was sometimes resulting in partial data being sent from SAM to Excel. Should we create a separate issue for this to investigate after the release?

[sjanzou]

@sjanzou Do you have any thoughts on how fixable this OLE Automation error might be? I had not noticed it was sometimes resulting in partial data being sent from SAM to Excel. Should we create a separate issue for this to investigate after the release?

The OLE Automation error is from automtn.cpp in src/msw/ole folder in wxWidgets:

According to Microsoft, the error can be caused by a reference issue
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/excel-automation-fails-second-time-code-runs-6647c4b4-da5c-ee1f-cc6f-58815d47702d

I created issue #1563

[cpaulgilman]

I think this PR fixes #1403. For this test file, I get reasonably close NPV, real LCOE, and nominal LCOE:

@brtietz Can we merge this into Develop and deal with the OLE Automation error separately with #1563?

[brtietz]

Looks good based on test file