Southeast Asia Energy Development & Utility Company Ensures Grid Resource Adequacy with PLEXOS®

This case study focuses on a state-owned energy development company that is the primary vertically integrated power utility in its region in Southeast Asia.  

The company is charged with the generation, transmission, distribution and retail sale of electricity for a service territory that includes nearly three million people in both urban and rural areas. It employs thousands of people, making it one of the largest employers in the region.

The utility largely relies on regional natural resources, such as hydropower, coal and gas, to power its extensive electricity network. It is focused on expanding the use of renewable energy in the coming years. As of 2022, it was the region's largest renewable energy developer and provider with more than six gigawatts (GW) of installed renewable capacity. The company’s long-term goal is to maintain a generation mix that is dominated (60%) by renewable resources. 

From Developing to Developed Economy

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the regional government accelerated progress toward establishing a digital, green and circular economy, aiming to become a developed and high-income area by 2030. It met the high-income portion of that goal ahead of schedule when it surpassed the World Bank’s gross national income per capita threshold of US$14,005.  

Plans are in place to double the region’s economic growth by the end of the decade. Government officials expect the area to have a strong economy, advanced technological infrastructure and a high quality of life for its citizens by 2030 - all hallmarks of a competitive and fully developed economy. 

Supporting Sustainable and Continuous Growth

As the region’s primary electricity provider, the utility must support the region’s continuous economic growth by meeting the increasing demand for reliable and renewable energy. To do so, the utility must ensure it has adequate resources to power new businesses and increased demand from general consumers, while also managing the intermittent nature of renewable energy resources.  

To assess grid generation reliability and inform resource outage planning strategies, it must perform a comprehensive analysis of its resources. The utility selected PLEXOS® - an advanced modeling platform that helps energy organizations and utilities manage increasingly complex energy systems - to perform this analysis.  

Ensuring Reliable Future Capacity with PLEXOS®

Considering operational constraints such as minimum stable run, maximum response, fuel price, must-run units and more, the company uses PLEXOS to model load, generation and outages. Specifically, the utility performs projected assessment of system adequacy (PASA) simulations to calculate and retrieve reliability indices such as: 

• Loss of load probability (LOLP), or the probability that demand will exceed capacity
• Expected demand not served (EDNS), or the expected demand (in megawatts) that won’t be served during the time block established for the PASA study
• Loss of load expected (LOLE), or the expected duration of an outage
• Expected energy not served (EENS), which is calculated as the EDNS multiplied by the number of hours in the study’s time block 

These PASA simulations allow the utility to maintain reliability and determine the optimal maintenance periods for each of its generators to avoid negative impacts on grid reliability.

The utility also performs medium-term (MT) and short-term (ST) schedule simulations. MT schedule simulations are used to decompose, or break down, complex systems into more manageable parts. They’re also key to planning trajectories for the management of hydro storage, heat rates and other operational constraints. These data points also inform the utility’s maintenance scheduling.  

ST schedules are utilized to perform unit commitment, economic dispatch, stochastic optimization and constraint modeling for semi-hourly or hourly dispatch.

For example, the company uses PLEXOS’ PASA, MT and ST models to inform its 2030 outage planning. It can quickly run hundreds of simulations to determine which generators can go offline for maintenance and which can be decommissioned. PLEXOS can also factor in the impact of new generation resources and generator forced outages across the utility’s entire energy ecosystem. By determining the optimal outage strategy, the company can maintain grid generation reliability.  

Benefits of Resource Adequacy Modeling with PLEXOS

The company found that some key advantages of using PLEXOS for resource adequacy modeling include:

• Flexibility to use either a deterministic or a probabilistic approach to generate results
• Ability to use the same platform to inform both long-term and daily plans
• Configurations for hydro firm power, planned outages, forced outages and heat rates
• Modeling of intermittent renewable energy resources
• Wide range of customizable parameters to generate accurate results, including:
  
  
  • Typical generator maintenance cycles and frequency
  • Historical forced outage rates
  • Minimum, maximum and/or mean time to repair
  • Variable renewable energy data files, such as solar system profiles
  • Generator minimum stable limit
  • Spinning reserve provisions
  • Hydro energy limits  

PLEXOS Helps Ensure Grid Generation Adequacy

PLEXOS has been vital in helping the utility measure the reliability of its power system. The company generates two primary reports from the PLEXOS platform. The first report includes the power system reliability indices generated by PASA simulations, with a primary focus on capacity reserve margins or the system peak demand. It also forecasts the expected severity of any potential outages.  

The second report focuses on unserved energy (ST), which, based on the unit commitment and the constraint modeling, determines the load that could not be met due to generation shortages. Stochastic optimization can be used to further improve the metrics generated in this report.  

The resource adequacy modeling that the utility has done, and continues to do, in PLEXOS promises to help it in its mission to support the region’s expanding economy by ensuring grid generation adequacy through 2030 and beyond. 

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