We're thrilled to unveil Southern Lights v.1.6.0, marking another step in our journey of continuous improvements, shaped by the valuable feedback from our users. This release brings several new features designed to further empower your development of green hydrogen projects.

New Features at a glance

Results page

We are delighted to share the brand new Results page! Simply click "Results" in the sidebar after finishing all design steps. This page gives you an overview of your project that allows you to review all your inputs and all generated results - all in one page. Try it out!

Share results

The "Share Results" feature on the Results page introduces a streamlined way to collaborate and communicate your project designs with colleagues and stakeholders by creating a shareable link. This link, which becomes public upon creation, offers an efficient method to present your work, ensuring that your team and any interested parties can easily access and review the project details. Importantly, you maintain complete control over this link, possessing the ability to deactivate it at any point to restrict access. Have a look at this shared design.

Pay-per-usage for Power Sources

Want to create a pay-as-used cost for a power source? Now you can! By assigning your OPEX costs to “Energy allocated” instead of “Energy Out” (the default), your costs will only be applied to the energy that goes into the electrolyzer. Note that this feature follows the order in which power sources are declared, which means that designs with multiple power sources may give you unexpected results if you do not make you don’t consider the order. We would love your feedback on how and where you use this!

Custom electrolyzers

In the Electrolyzer page, you can now upload custom electrolyzer models! This enables you to modify the efficiency, degradation, and performance map to match any data from any other providers or technologies you are working with. Simply download our template excel sheet and make the necessary changes before re-uploading the file. The custom electrolyzers are shared between all users in your company.

Default cost templates

Default cost templates for Power Sources and Electrolyzers: We now provide templates for the cost structure of both Power Sources and Electrolyzers. In a new Power Source, you will find an OPEX group called “Energy” with two entries defined. For the Electrolyzer, the template includes a set of CAPEX groups (Equipment and Installation), OPEX groups (Water, Land, and O&M) and a group for Stack replacements in Capital Replacement Cost. This is based on our best-practice setup for cost in a hydrogen project, but of course, you can add and customize the default as much as you like. Please let us know what your favourite cost structures look like, so we can include it for you in a future release.

Important note on changes in LCOH

This update brings an update in how the discount rates of financials are applied to costs and revenues when calculating present values of costs. Since we do all our simulations on an hourly basis, we now apply the discount rates on a monthly basis, and by doing so we capture any costs changing within each year of operations. We simultaneously harmonized the way present values are calculated across the product. What this means for your designs is that LCOH will increase by a few percent if your discount rate is substantial. If your discount rate is zero, no change will be seen at all. This update is a further step in our efforts to give you the most close-to-reality cost metrics. Please reach out to us if your like support in understanding how this affects your particular projects - we are always here to help.

Other Fixes

• Import file now warns if you upload data with leap days. You then need to edit your file by removing 1 day of value. Example: If files contain 8784 rows, instead of 8760 rows as in a non-leap year, a warning will appear.
• Subsidies that are fixed now show you the currency of the project, instead of showing “EUR”.
• New power source now comes with a default name “New power source”. You can easily update that name by simply clicking the headline where the power source name is displayed, or by using the input box for name.