Description

SAM#2008 describes a bug in which deselecting the option to save lifetime variables in a PV-Battery simulation leads SAM to crash. The underlying cause of the crash is described more thoroughly in the SAM issue, but briefly, it is a heap corruption bug caused by the smaller, non-lifetime allocations being too small to compute figures for the battery in cmod_pvsamv1.cpp.

This PR partially resolves this issue by disallowing the option to not save lifetime variables in cases where more than one year is simulated for a PV-Battery system.

A separate PR in the SAM repository disables the corresponding checkbox in the UI for this option and additionally adds a warning message explaining why this option is disabled.

To review, see @brtietz's instructions in the SAM issue:

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

Set up a behind the meter, detailed PV + battery simulation (tested with host developer)
On the "DC degradation" page, uncheck the "save all output variables over analysis period" box
Set up a grid outage (tested with 100% crit load and an outage in every timestep
Run the simulation
SAM crashes

Fixes NatLabRockies/SAM#2008

Corresponding branches and PRs:

NatLabRockies/SAM#2087

Unit Test Impact:

No changes expected for tests.

Checklist

• requires help revision and I added that label
• adds, removes, modifies, or deletes variables in existing compute modules
• adds a new compute module
• changes defaults
• I've tagged this PR to a milestone