Site and Value Power Projects With One Platform
Market Opportunity to Transaction in One Platform
Discover Opportunities
Identify where and how to invest using advanced siting, sizing, and market opportunity analysis.
Forecast Market Value
Model long-term wholesale market prices and retail electricity rates with operationally validated forecasts.
Evaluate Investments
Produce transparent, defensible asset and portfolio valuations that incorporate realistic market conditions.
Bring Assets to Market
Move seamlessly from valuation to transaction with AEX, included withevery PowerVAL subscription.
The PowerVAL™ Difference More Value From Every Decision
From siting and sizing new projects to forecasting wholesale prices, retail rates, and long-term asset value, PowerVAL provides an integrated, comprehensive view of market opportunity.
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Anticipate and understand market shifts with bankable price, supply, and policy insights that optimize planning, investment, and performance.
Site with Speed and Confidence
Integrated siting expertise and high-fidelity interconnection analytics save time and reduce development risk before capital is deployed
Gain the Clearest View of Today’s and Tomorrow’s Power Markets
Ascend’s operationally validated wholesale market forecasts combine the best aspects of multiple models to capture both today's near-term dynamics and tomorrow's structural shifts
Understand DER Value Before you Build
Long-term retail rate forecasts reveal customer economics driving project success
Access Bankable Valuations
Transparent valuations provide a credible foundation for investment, financing, and M&A decisions
Capture the Value of Location
Granular nodal modeling reveals how congestion and transmission constraints shape project economics
Prioritize Your Highest-Value Opportunities
Consistent cross-technology valuation enables better capital allocation decisions
Gain Faster, Better M&A Transactions
Integrated AEX workflows connect valuation directly to transaction execution, supported by expert advisors and a broader buyer network to reduce friction and maximize deal outcome
Access MI Hub to Support Decision Making
PowerVAL customers have full access to Ascend’s rich hub of maps, visualizations, market reports, offtake opportunities, and more
Move Seamlessly from Analysis to Execution
An integrated workflow takes projects from valuation through transaction with fewer handoffs and greater efficiency, saving time and money
One Platform, Five Integrated Areas of Expertise
PowerVAL combines integrated areas of expertise to help organizations site projects, evaluate opportunities, forecast market value, optimize investments, and execute transactions with confidence. Together, these capabilities deliver the market intelligence, operational analytics, and transaction support needed to maximize asset value across the entire investment lifecycle.
Data Center and Power Project Siting
ISO-Aligned Power Flow Modeling
Models each ISO/RTO's own base case power flow models, buildout rules, and load conditions, using industry-standard tools to mirror each market's own interconnection study methodology.
Incremental Headroom & Contingency Analysis
Injects or withdraws power in 1 MW increments at each POI until the first constraint binds, running full-region N-1 contingency analysis to identify binding constraints for both generation injection and load withdrawal.
Upgrade Cost Estimation
Estimates the cost of network upgrades required to relieve each constraint, such as material, wiring, installation, and foundation expenses, standardized for apples-to-apples comparison across POIs and markets.
Benchmarked Accuracy
Validated against completed ISO cluster study results, with upgrade cost estimates landing within 20% of actual ISO-determined costs.
Asset Valuation
Physical & Dispatch Modeling
Selects operating strategies from naïve to perfect foresight, incorporating round-trip efficiencies, charging/discharging constraints, cycling limits, and degradation and augmentation schedules, with dispatch simulations that adhere to ISO market rules.
Integrated Price Forecasting
Fully integrated with AscendMI price forecasts, with the flexibility to upload sensitivities or alternative forecasts.
Proprietary Geospatial Mapping
Combines price forecasts, investment metrics by resource type and location, nodal marginal emissions, interconnection data, renewable capture rates, and IRA incentives into a single map layer.
Revenue Stack & Battery Activity Visualization
Built-in tools visualize forecasted revenue stacks and sub-hourly battery activity/SoC to compare sensitivities and daily asset dynamics.
Market Intelligence: Wholesale Markets
30+ Year Nodal Forecasts
For sub-hourly day-ahead and real-time power prices, capacity prices, RECs, renewable capture rates, and hourly marginal emissions at every US node, hub, and market.
Policy & Structural Sensitivities
Built-in sensitivities capture how structural and policy drivers affect market prices and project values.
Comprehensive Coverage
Forecasts account for and incorporate multiple layers of information, including cost of land, renewable resource potential, IRA energy communities, transmission infrastructure, population density, interconnection queue status, and other criteria.
Bankable, Finance-Grade Track Record
Ascend’s work underpins more than $50 billion of project valuation assessments.
Market Intelligence: Retail Rates
Model-Driven Retail Projections
Produces model-driven retail rate projections for community solar and distributed generation revenue.
Transparent Rate-Component Breakdown
Breaks down supply, transmission, and distribution rate components and ties them to underlying wholesale drivers, risk factors, and policy.
Geospatial Locational Value Mapping
Maps pricing dynamics and revenue potential across 50,000+ U.S. nodes together with hosting capacity, interconnection queue position, parcel data, and substation/transmission locations, kept current on the Market Intelligence Hub.
DER Program Compensation Support
Specific 25-year outlooks for distributed energy compensation programs in New York and Illinois, incorporating dispatch optimization for all applicable value stack, cost, and program components.
Ascend Energy Exchange (AEX)
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Expert Advisory
Support from specialists who understand market dynamics, asset valuations, economic and development risks, asset operations, interconnection challenges, and commercial considerations.
Bundled at No Extra Cost
Included with every PowerVAL subscription, with no upfront listing fees and a 100% success-based model.
One Workflow, Valuation to Transaction
Optimizes an asset from first valuation through final transaction in a single, unified workflow.
Reduced Friction, Faster Deal Readiness
Aligns valuation analytics with transaction execution to reduce friction and accelerate deal readiness.
Deeper Bidder Pool
Draws on Ascend's ecosystem of buyers and sellers to engage roughly 5x the bidders of a typical sale process.
Related Products & Capabilities
Key Resources
Can VDER Storage Match the Success of VDER Solar?
New York's VDER program rewards battery storage that gets dispatch timing right, though charging costs and capacity market risk vary widely by utility. Gain insights into where storage value lives in the VDER stack and why proposed rate changes could reshape returns.
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Retail Rates, Load Growth, and the Rising Value of Demand-Side Solutions
This publication is the fifth and final in a series from Ascend Analytics that considers the implications of rapid load growth on U.S. capacity markets, high capacity prices as the new normal, the risks that new realities create for business-as-usual strategies, and the opportunities that this paradigm shift enables for well-planned new entry resources.
