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Utilities, retailers, and Community Choice Aggregators turn to Ascend Analytics to implement efficient RFO/RFP processes that support intelligent and defendable risk-based decisions on behalf of their customers. Ascend provides end-to-end support for the energy procurement process, including a detailed focus on ensuring the process captures the value of renewables and storage under the system dynamics of today and the future.
Ascends' process engages up to 4 times the number of respondents through leveraging its developer network, realizing a more competitive outcome. With straight through processing of data, Ascend automatically churns through a hundred bid submissions in a week to produce a list of least cost finalists.
Ascend offers full-service procurement with an experienced team of analysts who have helped our customers procure over 10 million megawatt-hours per year of renewable energy and 12,000 MWh of battery storage capacity. Our support services include defining the procurement need, administering and hosting the RFO/RFP process, evaluating projects, and supporting during negotiations.
Ascend's industry-leading software suite provides the capability to select the best resources through evaluation of demand- and supply-side resources on a level playing field. This includes demand response, energy efficiency, behind-the-meter solar and storage, electric vehicle smart charging, as well as utility-scale renewables, storage, and traditional thermal resources. Offtakers get access to Ascend's proprietary market price forecasts that capture the impacts from accelerating renewable and battery adoption, such as increasing price volatility, changing price shapes, and real-time price spikes.
Ascend leveraged its extensive experience in energy procurement and connections in the industry to develop a highly automated and refined RFO/RFP process. Our full administration services include:
Ascend’s evaluation captures both the project economics and the ESG impact of projects.PowerSIMM is used to evaluate demand- and supply-side resources on a level playing field and capture the economic risk by simulating performance across a range of possible futures. Energy or capacity normalized metrics are used to account for projects of different sizes, technologies, and commercial operational dates. Ascend also collaborates with the offtaker to select scoring criteria for the ESG impact of a project.
Our approach captures the value of flexible resources for day-ahead and real-time (sub-hourly) markets for energy and ancillary services. Ascend's proprietary forecasts are used to simulate nodal prices to account for basis risks and renewable saturation in specific areas. Net present values of revenues and costs from the different streams are represented and projects are ranked based on the metric of interest.
Signing PPA contracts can be a risky engagement, locking in purchase obligations for extended time periods. While perfect foresight remains impossible, Ascend's valuation approach assesses and mitigates the primary risks:
Ascend's forecasting approach accounts for the evolving market dynamics associated with increasing renewable generation while remaining firmly grounded in long-run economic equilibrium theory. This approach prevents “over-anchoring” to historical price behavior while also not overweighing the present or near-term future.
Ascend's models simulate nodal prices and their correlations with weather and renewable output, thus accounting for price depression at geographic locations with high renewable penetrations. This approach avoids overvaluing resources at saturated locations.
Ascend's stochastic modeling accounts for the variation in renewable generation at sub-hourly, hourly, daily, seasonal, and annual time-steps, thus providing a valuation under a realistic range of conditions rather than relying on approximations based on “average” conditions. This approach allows for quantifying potential variation in revenues, market exposure, loss of load events, carbon emissions, and other important factors affected by the variable output from renewables.
"Ready to Roll" analytics and preconfigured models for any region or node
Critical insights for portfolio management in a high renewables future
Our expertise includes planning, valuation, risk management & ISO operations
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