Publications

The emission reduction value of storage has been locked behind a glass cage: everyone can see the potential for storage to reduce the grid’s carbon intensity, but, until now, the incentives and analytics required to value storage’s carbon abatement effects have been lacking.

Ascend Analytics’ analysis of the Q1 2024 IRS guidance (IRS Notice 2024-30) and 2023 unemployment data indicates important changes to Energy Community Eligibility, significantly impacting certain developer projects.

Retiring thermal capacity and clogged interconnection queues have created a system planning challenge over recent years for the PJM RTO, the largest organized power market in the US. However, PJM’s 2024 Load Forecast Report reveals that the RTO may possess more than just a supply problem: PJM expects demand to grow 2.2% per year over the next 15 years.

Due to increasingly complex state-of-charge management requirements and power market product optionality, storage asset owners and managers have turned to automated bid optimization solutions to maximize revenues.

The introduction of the ERCOT Contingency Reserve Service (ECRS) presents a valuable revenue opportunity for storage assets in a landscape of increasingly saturated ancillary service markets. .

Ascend Analytics has guided and supported over 100 project financings and M&A transactions for energy storage and hybrid assets since 2020.  The valuations produced by Ascend’s long-term forecasting and valuation tool, BatterySIMM^TM, are accepted by development, banking, and finance institutions worldwide because they can trust that our forecasts have been validated by real-world experience.  This experience is developed in another Ascend product offering - SmartBidder - that provides live bid optimization for operational assets.  This paper will compare results from the SmartBidder live operations product and the BatterySIMM long-term valuation product.

As energy price volatility grows with renewable buildout and ancillary prices decline with battery storage buildout, battery revenues will increasingly rely on energy arbitrage as a revenue source.

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.

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.

The electric industry is undergoing a significant transition, decarbonizing production while supporting the electrification of the US economy. Key concepts such as resource adequacy need to be re-evaluated in the context of that transition.

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.

The rapid deployment of renewable energy is fundamentally transforming energy supply and power markets, resulting in lower average prices but also more volatile prices. These new market dynamics are causing pain for inflexible generation resources, but also creating significant revenue-enhancing opportunities for flexible resources, particularly in the ancillary services and real-time markets.

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.