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SERVM
Expansion and reliability planning in one model
Energy companies have made aggressive plans to transition to clean energy resources.
This means shutting down thousands of MW’s of carbon emitting power plants and building wind, solar, and storage resources to replace them.
Selecting the right mix of resources to build requires a deep understanding of both the economic and reliability contributions of all classes and configurations of available technologies.
And the number of different portfolio
options can feel endless!
The Old Approach to Expansion Planning
Historically, most energy companies have only used reliability inputs such as Planning Reserve Margin and Effective Load Carrying Capability (ELCC) values in their expansion planning software to select resources. But those inputs can’t adequately account for load growth, changing demand patterns, and complicated synergies among resource classes. So they are forced to test the resulting expansion plans in a separate resource adequacy model multiple times to ensure reliability and economic efficiency. This painful process can last for weeks or months!
A New Approach to Expansion Planning
At Astrapé, our approach is to perform the reliability and economic analysis simultaneously to ensure a globally optimal solution.
Since reliability planning is inherently high-impact, low-probability analysis, SERVM’s modeling capabilities have been rigorously developed to capture a wide distribution of possible events and accurately reflect system operations including:
Emergency operating procedures
Effects of weather variability on load, renewable, and hydro output
Efficient energy storage charging and discharging
Ancillary service eligibility across resource classes
Conventional outage patterns during extreme weather
Dynamic market interactions that reflect transmission and resource availability constraints
Our economic commitment and dispatch uses proprietary algorithms that can simulate thousands of scenarios in the time it takes to simulate a single scenario in most tools.
With this performance advantage, a common question is whether our economic results are dependable.
With each client, we rigorously benchmark our economic outcomes to solutions from commercial mathematical solvers.
The increased performance allows planners to develop plans that are economically optimal not only for expected conditions but also for tomorrow’s highly variable systems while ensuring reliability.
Incorporating SERVM into your planning processes will provide your management with confidence that your resource plan is economically efficient and your customers confidence that their lights will stay on.