Publications

Publications

PJM's Capacity Market: The Short Squeeze on Coal and Growing Opportunities for Battery Storage

August 24, 2023

In February 2023, PJM finalized the results for its Base Residual Auction (BRA) for the 2024/2025 delivery year. Capacity prices in this auction fell to just under $29/MW-day, the lowest since 2014, continuing a trend of declining prices exhibited in the past several BRAs.

Publications

Ancillary Market Saturation in CAISO and ERCOT: A Series of Predictable Events

July 27, 2023

Ancillary services have been a key component of storage revenue stacks since batteries began coming online, turbocharging returns for some operating projects. However, this turbocharger has already started to wane in CAISO and ERCOT and services as a harbinger for ancillary decline in other markets.

Publications

Resource Adequacy Modeling for a High Renewable Future

June 9, 2022

Planning for power system resource adequacy, once a relatively straightforward engineering calculation, is now characterized by growing complexity and uncertainty in both supply and demand. In the face of increasing complexity, many of the tools power system planners relied on are now becoming obsolete. This paper defines approaches for determining resource adequacy in high renewable systems with energy storage.

Publications

Making the Right Resource Choice Requires Making the Right Model Choice

September 1, 2021

What do traditional production cost models miss about a changing resource mix with more intermittent renewables and storage? A lot! This paper shows how traditional models lead to model limited choice, where model limitations lead to systematic biases in favor of relatively inflexible legacy resource options.

Publications

Opinion: Colorado poised to become advanced energy leader with Congress' help

October 27, 2019

Advanced energy is one of the fastest growing sectors of Colorado's economy, and energy legislation before Congress could position Colorado as a national and global leader.

Publications

The Next Big Thing: Grid-Tied Batteries. How to Maximize Value

March 4, 2019

In this op-ed for pv magazine, Mike Mendelsohn & Dr. Allison Weis of Ascend Analytics break down the value of battery storage and the profitability of this tech

Publications

A New Evaluation Paradigm for Flexible Resources

February 11, 2019

NARUC's recent guidance on flexible resources requires new tools

Publications

ERCOT summer forward curves have crested toward $160/MWh for July/August

November 6, 2018

ERCOT summer forward curves have crested toward $160/MWh for July and August in the wake of an ERCOT ISO report that reserve margins could be below 10%.

Publications

The Digitalization of Power

September 7, 2018

September 7, 2018

The continued advances in in digital power supply systems will provide more compelling and often unavoidable economic merit over traditional generation.

Publications

Navigating the New Energy Market Dynamics

January 1, 2018

2018

Utilities need to adopt new decision-making tools in order to compete in the "new normal" environment of renewable energy supply.

Publications

Simulating meaningful uncertainty for complex physical and financial portfolios

September 1, 2016

The meaningful uncertainty simulation framework can extract all relevant information contained in market and portfolio data to give energy firms the ability to make informed business decisions.