Across US power markets, load growth projections continue to soar, driven by increasing electrification, data center growth, manufacturing reshoring, and evolving regulatory demands. More than ever, asset developers, utilities, merchant operators, and financiers require sophisticated tools to assess value, risk, and opportunity.  

In this context, Ascend Analytics' recently launched the PowerVAL™ platform, which provides advanced power project valuation functionality and robust market intelligence to help power market stakeholders optimize financial performance while navigating an increasingly complex operating landscape.

Key Takeways

• Ascend's PowerVAL platform, which significantly expands the functionality of Ascend’s market-leading energy project valuation tool (formerly known as BatterySIMM) to now encompass solar, storage, wind, hybrid and thermal projects, allows developers, banks, investors, utilities, independent power producers (IPPs), and distributed energy operators to build realistic valuations that drive optimal decision making.
• In modern power markets, stakeholders with complex portfolios that encompass mixed asset classes require far greater granularity when it comes to revenue modeling, site selection and financial evaluation.
• All PowerVAL valuations and outlooks are anchored on Ascend’s Opportunity Cost Forecasting Framework, reflecting the pricing dynamics associated with weather-driven volatility and long-term equilibrium.
• PowerVAL optimizes energy asset valuations through dispatch and operational simulations, can provide market assessments at nodal levels, and enables a high degree of flexibility when it comes to scenario planning.

Needed: Deeper Granularity and Richer Revenue Modeling for Energy Project Planning and Valuation

In today's rapidly evolving energy markets, stakeholders with complex portfolios, mixed asset classes, distributed projects, or community solar need deeper granularity and richer revenue modeling.  

However, traditional valuation methods often fall short when trying to capture the many dimensions of modern energy assets. Diverse asset types – such as solar, wind, thermals, storage, hybrids, behind-the-meter systems, and distributed energy portfolios – each come with different revenue streams, risk profiles, regulatory constraints, and operational behaviors. Similarly, many asset types possess value beyond just income earned through energy sales: depending on the asset, value might also exist in demand response, capacity markets, and ancillary services.

Localized market rules and grid dynamics matter, too. The performance of an asset depends heavily on where it is located, and on corresponding market rules, node congestion, wholesale pricing structures, and transmission constraints.  

Additionally, traditional valuation approaches often fail to capture the critical dynamics of modern power markets. Rather than simply relying on a traditional economic assessments, long-term forecasts for asset valuation should employ an opportunity cost approach that also accounts for the way that key drivers such as weather-driven volatility, evolving policy, and stakeholder demand will impact future rate or price shifts.

PowerVAL: An Optimal Solution for Power Project Valuation, Planning, and Development

Ascend's PowerVAL platform is designed to account for modern energy market dynamics in a way that lets users build realistic valuations that drive optimal decision making. Specifically, Ascend's approach provides the following advantages:

• Valuation of all asset types – Allows stakeholders to evaluate mixed-asset or hybrid projects while using a single solution

• Wholesale + retail revenue modeling – Captures both nodal pricing and retail rate exposure to assess full income potential

• Revenue stream modeling and comparison – Allows users to model how different revenue streams (e.g. ancillary, capacity, energy, retail offsets) can stack up, and what operations optimize those stacks

• Full financial evaluation options – Allows evaluation against wholesale market prices, retail rates, or both

• Distributed and portfolio asset valuations – Supports valuation of community solar, behind-the-meter, virtual power plants (VPPs), aggregated distributed assets

• Optimal siting and sizing – Allows users to maximize value by modeling location-specific factors and by optimizing system size, rather than relying on generic assumptions

• High-granularity market modeling – Provides wholesale market outlooks across ~50,000 U.S. nodes, with detailed policy, weather, and operational modeling built in

PowerVAL Produces Defendable, Bankable Energy Asset Valuations

Who PowerVAL Can Benefit

PowerVAL allows a broad set of power market stakeholders to benefit from its capabilities:

• Developers – compare siting options, size projects optimally, assess mixed portfolio options

• Investors / financiers – build bankable valuation models, assess risks under multiple revenue streams, model post-PPA performance

• Utilities / IPPs – integrate distributed energy, decide whether to build, buy or contract assets, understand behind-the-meter vs front-of-meter opportunities

• Community Solar / Distributed Energy Operators – evaluate retail rate exposure, behind the meter, and customer/site-level variability with more precision

Interested in Learning More?

Trusted across hundreds of deals and more than $1 billion in transaction value, PowerVAL provides bankable revenue forecasts and nodal-specific valuations for storage, renewables, and hybrid projects under multiple operating strategies across all ISOs. Please contact us to learn more.