The traditional challenge of balancing out short-term asset operations with physical asset constraints has expanded to include the economic opportunity costs of market interactions for energy and ancillary services.

Ascend has the most advanced software solutions to realize the full value of generation through optimal dispatch and short-term system management.

Dispatch optimization addresses the critical problem of short-term asset optimization for integrated utilities focused on serving load and wholesale generators operating in competitive power markets with nodal prices.  With today’s energy market design, complex generation profiles, price volatility and trading instruments, portfolio managers cannot afford to use old modeling solutions and let transparent and real opportunities to profit sit unrealized.

Asset optimization can be configured to address:

• Economic Dispatch - to maximize market opportunities to prices for energy and ancillaries in competitive power markets.
• Dispatch to Load - to minimize the cost of serving load and ancillary service requirements subject to transmission constraints for imports and exports
• Load Limited Dispatch - dispatch economically up to the point of servicing native load, which usually applies to select generation units or contracts
• Hybrid Dispatch - generators within a power supply portfolio are designated as either dispatch to load or economic dispatch

Dispatch optimization identifies more efficient modes of asset operation through a multi-pass dynamic optimization routine that produces feasible operating solutions strictly adhering to complex constraints.   Tests have demonstrated that Ascend’s dispatch routinely improves upon the solution set of existing dispatch routines.  In addition, our dynamic database supports rapid processing of active plant state, market conditions, and system data as inputs.

Addressing the critical problem of short-term asset optimization