We're thrilled to unveil Southern Lights v.1.5.0, marking another step in our journey of continuous improvements, shaped by the valuable feedback from our users. This release brings a major upgrade in our energy system models, designed to further empower your development of green hydrogen projects.

This release will require you to re-simulate any project designs you have previously made in Southern Lights. A notification window will show when you load an old designs.

New Features at a glance:

• Faster simulations, with up to 10x speed, thanks to our optimized calculation algorithms.
• A brand new cost input structure with greater flexibility in assigning costs. For a complete intro of the new cost inputs, please have a look at this tutorial.
• You can now define costs in five cost categories (DevEx, CapEx, OpEx, Capital Replacement Costs and Decommissioning Costs) for both Power Sources and Electrolyzers.
• Costs can now have an unlimited number of cost entries that are grouped together for convenient overview.
• Define costs in three different ways to have full control over the design: “Fixed” costs, “Per unit of” costs, and “% of” costs.
• "Fixed" costs: Specify an absolute number.
• "Per unit of" costs: Specify specific costs that are connected to attributes of each component.
• "% of" costs: Make a cost entry that is calculated as a percentage of another cost.
• Create a ‘Subsidy’ for any cost or cost group, to see the effect of grants on your total cost metrics.
• “Fixed” subsidy: Set an absolute number for your subsidy
• “% of Parent”: Sets a percentage of the category, group or entry where the subsidy is applied.
• More detailed graphs for cost: New breakdowns of the costs metrics charts allow you to see the pie charts in a division by groups or by components.
• New breakdowns of the costs metrics charts allow you to see the pie charts in a division by groups or by components
• CapEx, OpEx, and Present Values of Costs are now also displayed in the Quick results bar to the right.
• Full results also show tables divided by cost groups or by components with the click of a button.
• Opex time-series are now shown for every cost group created. Using the same group names in your components lets you see them stacked together.

Fixes:

• Cost definition for stack replacements: The stack cost decrease now works as expected in the new cost structure.
• Cost definition for subsidies: Capex subsidy in now applied correctly. Subsidies can be applied to any costs now, and works as expected.
• “Years of Operation” and “Construction time” can now be edited for any design. NB! We recommend updating the financial inputs ‘Debt term’ and ‘Depreciation’ when changing ‘Years of operation’ in a design.
• Design now always loads correctly when opening an old design (some issues previously)
• “Optimization” now runs the simulations with only the ‘Enabled’ Power Sources. Use the Enable toggle to control this
• ‘Location’ is now an optional input field.
• Cost calculations now run regardless of the content of the cost structure. No more mandatory fields for costs.
• ‘Duplicate design’ now runs faster and now quickly presents you with a new design copy.
• ‘Complete design’ is right now disabled. This feature will be rebuilt in a coming update - stay tuned.