EnSurance™ enables efficient financing for merchant storage with recovery and revenue guarantees. Ascend's valuation and operational capabilities enable slicing and transferring storage revenue risk to insurers more able to wear project tail risk. EnSurance's offerings support over 2000 MWh of storage projects with low-cost financing via our debt recovery and revenue guarantees, accelerating the deployment of the merchant storage demanded by increasingly renewable pre-dominated power markets.
Offering
Guarantees lender
principal recovery
Guarantees proxy or realized revenue
floor
Outcome
Enables 70% to 85%
leverage for merchant operations
Insures debt service
In highly volatile power markets across the country, investments in storage are being delayed due to high costs of capital required to overcome merchant revenue risk.
A client of Ascend's BatterySIMM and SmartBidder services was seeking means to mitigate merchant revenue exposure, in order to increase leverage on their 200 MW, 2-hr duration ERCOT project. The project sponsor first worked with the BatterySIMM team to optimize the system configuration for expected market dynamics, then developed with the SmartBidder group a dispatch strategy expected to maximize revenues within the desired risk thresholds. The EnSurance team then develped a stochastic underwriting model for expected revenues under the optimal system configuration and SmartBidder dispatch strategy, and sourced risk taking capacity to support two offerings to increase leverage and boost sponsor returns.
EnSurance protects project sponsor's downside returns while allowing them to retain upside exposure
Ascend creates efficient risk transfer through determining the actuarial based risk calculations on future outcomes and distributed these risks across broad pools of capital. We leverage our analytics engine PowerSIMM in conjunction with Ascend Market Intelligence for actuarial forecasting. BatterySIMM determines the valuation and forecasted operations with SmartBidder governing daily operations in compliance with risk return limits.
Ascend's unique suite of capabilities allow risk management partners to back EnSurance guarantees with low-cost capital.
"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