EnCompass Integrated Resource Planning

More Capabilities to Evaluate New Technologies

Determine the best way to use resources, which technologies you should add in the future, and which existing resources you should convert or retire.

Electric utilities face increasing complexity in power supply planning. It’s demanding to balance reliability requirements and environmental compliance cost-effectively.

With EnCompass you can develop a resource plan that considers all potential options, including central station construction, purchased power agreements, renewable energy, bulk storage, new transmission projects, energy efficiency programs, and demand response.

Capital Projects

Capital project calculations include detailed specifications for the operating life and constraints of adding new resources. Project financing parameters incorporate assumptions on capital expenditures, debt, taxes, return on equity, property taxes, insurance, and unregulated versus rate-based financing.

You can optimize the selection of new capital projects and existing resource conversions and retirements using mixed integer programming. The optimization may span multiple years, or you can break it into yearly overlapping segments. You can generate, rank and select for further analysis multiple least-cost plans, each one unique up to a specified year within the simulation period.

Using the structured scenario approach in EnCompass, you can apply results from a capital project optimization in multiple child scenarios, where you can evaluate a more detailed simulation with the new capacity mix.

Unification and Transparency

EnCompass has the most complete set of functions in the industry for modeling complex environmental programs such as carbon limits and overlapping renewable portfolio standards.

By combining the program limits with capital project optimization, EnCompass determines the best combination of new unit additions, retrofits, and retirements to meet a complex array of environmental regulations.

Environmental Compliance

Resources can be part of any number of programs, which may be annual or seasonal mass-based emission allowance programs, rate-based emission programs, or generation-based renewable energy credits. Rate-based emission programs may also include designated renewable and energy efficiency resources, which produce emission rate credits that can be used to offset fossil fuel generators.

You can directly input price forecasts for these allowances and credits into EnCompass, or you can enforce annual program limits, which will also produce allowance or credit prices. Each program may also include a bank that allows for over-compliance in early years to offset tighter limits in later years. A penalty price for exceeding annual limits acts as a reliability safety valve so that you can borrow allowances or credits from future years under extreme conditions.

Dynamic Renewable and Limited Storage Firm Capacity

The effective load-carrying capability (ELCC) of intermittent resources (e.g., wind and solar) and limited energy storage (e.g., lithium-ion batteries) tends to decline as you add more capacity, and in some cases will reach 0 if it hits a tipping point.

EnCompass lets you define multiple incremental ELCC curves for any group of resources. The capacity expansion logic in EnCompass will use these curves as part of the economic decision for selecting a resource plan. It then applies the average realized ELCC to all resources within the group for reserve margin contribution and capacity valuation.

EnCompass maintains reliability by dynamically reducing the firm capacity for incremental renewables and storage as you add more projects.