How the Council develops and uses models
As part of its power planning, the Council works with partners to develop modeling tools to forecast demand, determine cost-effective system investments to meet that demand, and simulate power system operations.
The Council and its advisory committees aid software providers in the development (GENESYS) and enhancement (OptGen/SDDP, AURORA, Itron) of these tools and develop methodologies to use them to support the Council's power planning efforts.
GENESYS – GENeration Evaluation SYStem Model
The GENESYS (Generation Evaluation System) model was developed to assess the adequacy of the Pacific Northwest regional power supply, given uncertain future conditions. It is also the primary analytical tool the Council uses to quantify the impacts of modifying hydroelectric system operations (e.g., to accommodate the changing needs of all river users).
OptGen/SDDP
OptGen (developed by PSR) is a long-term expansion planning model that determines the least-cost sizing and timing decisions for construction, retirement and reinforcement of generation capacities, transmission network and natural gas pipelines.
Aurora
Aurora (developed by Energy Exemplar) is a tool to assess the impact of new and existing wind, solar, and other intermittent generation sources. The model's dispatch logic captures and reveals the resulting changes in generation, imports/exports, reserve levels, and prices. It also includes long-term capacity expansion logic to accommodate intermittent resources and features to enable future-build-out scenario testing and comparisons.
Itron
The Council uses several forecasting tools and services from Itron. Their MetrixND is a statistical forecasting application for building statistically adjusted, long-term end-use demand forecasts. MetrixLT is a long-run load shape toolkit providing hourly weather processing, load shaping, and bottom-up, end-use forecasting.