EnCompassTM is Yes Energy's energy market modeling and electricity price forecasting software, built for energy professionals who need to make high-stakes supply decisions. It's designed to help teams produce market price forecasts, analyze generation and transmission development, and make informed decisions on the transitioning power grid — covering everything from short-term trading to long-term capital planning.
EnCompass Cloud is the latest evolution of the platform, bringing the same modeling capabilities into a cloud-native environment. This means Yes Energy handles all the infrastructure — backups, patching, hardware, and maintenance — while users get automatic updates, stronger security, and elastic compute that scales with demand.
In this blog post, Jason Atwood, Director of Business Development at Yes Energy and an EnCompass power user, shares how moving his energy market modeling to EnCompass Cloud completely changed the way he works.
I was so excited when I found out that I would be one of the internal testers of EnCompass Cloud. I knew it would transform the way I do energy market modeling, and it hasn’t disappointed.
As a Solution Engineer at Yes Energy, my primary duty is demonstrating how our EnCompass Power Planning Software can address a client’s pain point, increase their efficiency, and streamline their workflow.
Each demo focuses on a client’s specific use case and area of interest. While I can’t be prepared to show every single use case immediately, my goal is to have the most popular scenarios ready to go at a moment’s notice. Nobody wants to wait days or weeks to see a demo.
This means I need simulations that show:
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Price forecasting, including LMP, congestion, and loss components
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Generator operations and curtailment
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Congestion
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Site new transmission and generation
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Data center analysis
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Market impacts, such as changes in demand, fuel prices, and renewable forecasts
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Source/Sink impacts of transmission
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Shift Factors
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New contingency identification
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Sub-hourly simulations
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Automation
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And more
I also need each of these scenarios prepped for the Eastern, Western, and ERCOT Interconnections because we have clients across the country.
To show you why I’m so excited about EnCompass Cloud, let me take you on a stroll down memory lane and tell you how I used to run these simulations.
Initial method
When I first started using EnCompass, I ran the simulations locally on my laptop. Now, understand that my laptop is very powerful. It has 10 cores and 10 virtual cores, plenty of RAM, and way more memory than I’ll ever use. I often joke that it needs pumps and fans like a main power transformer to keep it from overheating.
But just like all hardware, it has its limits. Even with all that power, I had to run my simulations sequentially.
Here’s how it played out for ERCOT: I have 18 scenarios — a base case and seventeen change cases — and I need to analyze all the items from the list above for each of those cases.
At first, I segmented annual simulations into twelve monthly runs. However, I quickly discovered that those twelve segments consumed most of my computing power to run the simulation, slowing my computer and leaving me little time to read emails and do my other work.
So, I pivoted and segmented the simulations into six two-month segments, which freed up enough compute power for me to perform my other duties.
Still, it took about four hours to run a single ERCOT simulation. Four hours multiplied by eighteen scenarios is seventy-two hours. And that’s just for ERCOT. I also had to run the same 18 simulations for the West and East.
In short, it took almost two weeks to update all fifty-four of my scenarios.
Keep in mind that this isn’t a one-and-done activity. I had to rerun my scenarios each time we had a new data or software release. I also had to make sure my scenarios and data were backed up regularly.
Yes Energy updates EnCompass data twice a year and does one major software update annually. So, in addition to running the simulations, it was my responsibility to update both the software and the data on my laptop as new versions were released. It’s not difficult to do, and it only takes a couple of minutes, but it was up to me to ensure I had the latest and greatest version running on my computer at all times.
This situation was not optimal, but like so many of us, I settled in, ran my process, and got the job done.
Intermediate method
After a fair amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth, I obtained a virtual machine to run simulations, freeing up my laptop to do other work.
With the extra compute capacity, I was able to increase my run segmentations from two-month blocks to one-month blocks, which reduced my overall run-time for all 54 scenarios to about a week. Cutting the run times for my scenarios in half was a tremendous improvement.
I was still responsible for backing up my scenarios, updating data twice a year, and ensuring I was running the latest version of the EnCompass software.
Once again, I settled into my routine… until a few months later, when I heard that EnCompass would soon offer a cloud option.
New method – Cloud configuration
When the opportunity arose to test EnCompass Cloud, I jumped at the chance. I assumed the cloud-based platform would really speed up my simulations and — spoiler alert — it did.
When I received my username and password, I logged in and saw that the interface was the same as the one I’d been using on my laptop and in my VM setup. I didn’t need to learn how to run the software because EnCompass Cloud works just like the on-premises version.
I also didn’t have to worry about installing the latest version of the software or updating any data — both had already been done.
First things first, I saved all my scenarios and datasets to the EnCompass Cloud, where they will be automatically backed up (one less thing for me to worry about since they no longer live on my local machine).
I decided to start with ERCOT, so I selected all eighteen of my scenarios and clicked the submit button. It was the end of my workday, so I closed my laptop and went about my evening business.
Did I mention that I have control over my hardware capacity? I can choose automatic and let EnCompass select the number of CPUs and gigabytes of memory it uses, or I can manually choose based on the type of simulation being performed.
The next morning, I eagerly logged in to EnCompass Cloud. What did I see? Eighteen scenarios were finished running, and the results were ready to review.
What used to take me three days to perform for the ERCOT region, the EnCompass Cloud completed overnight. In terms of the number of buses, resources, and branches, the West region is roughly three to four times the size of ERCOT, and the East region is approximately ten times the size of ERCOT. While runtime is not exactly linear, I was ecstatic to see that EnCompass Cloud produced a proportional reduction in runtime for those regions.
In talking with our other internal testers, I found they had seen similar results — runtime reductions of 65% to 86% compared to on-premise hardware for production costing market runs.
Now, I confidently log on to EnCompass Cloud each morning, knowing I never have to update software, that my scenarios are all backed up, and that I have on-demand scaling at my fingertips. No more putting off new clients for several days while I tailor a scenario for their specific use case. In most cases, we can perform the demo the next day.
Regardless of your workload, whether you run a few simulations a week or hundreds, exploring EnCompass Cloud is worthwhile. EnCompass Cloud has changed the way I work; it can do the same for you.
Check out the EnCompass interactive demo and request a demo of our EnCompass Cloud solution.
