Powering a Nation

PLEXOS Cloud is helping Jamaica Public Service Company optimize its power decisions.

Modeling energy markets has never been more important. Rising global energy demand, policy shifts, and digitization all present new challenges that require robust optimization software. But many modeling solutions can’t provide the power, speed, accuracy, or flexibility required to keep up with the pace of change.

Lincoy Small, a power system engineer with Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCO), found that old simulation platforms lack many of the capabilities that make PLEXOS Cloud a revolutionary solution.

As the sole distributor of electricity in Jamaica, JPSCO needed a modeling solution to meet the challenges of the evolving world. Especially important for JPSCO was the ability to easily analyze study outputs and collaborate with others.

“PLEXOS Cloud helped to enhance the visibility of the network, creating a better understanding of the integration and overall situational awareness between the generation solutions on top of the transmission network and the resulting power flows and grid economics,” Small says.

With PLEXOS Cloud, Small reports that he can easily use the enhanced visual reporting in high level presentations to colleagues and an external audience. This helps create greater awareness and understanding of grid studies and their resulting network impacts. Older simulation platforms don’t offer visual reporting that are as accessible as PLEXOS Cloud, Small says.

Enhanced Reporting

One of the goals in the development of PLEXOS Cloud was to give customers more digestible visual reports, so they can spend more time making the best decisions rather than analyzing data. At JPSCO, Small has experienced platforms where users had to manually extract the data and export it into reporting templates (prepared by the user) in another application before the data could really be analyzed.

“PLEXOS Cloud helped to enhance the reporting of solutions after conducting a simulation that improved our data analytics of the solutions developed,” Small says. “With the Cloud, the solution data is presented in already designed data formats that are more easily analyzed.”

Ultimately, this saves customers hours in manually preparing reports while providing easier to understand data, much faster.

More Power

The responsibility of distributing energy to an entire nation requires a robust modeling solution. So, when extra processing power is required, PLEXOS Cloud offers access to reserve computing.

“PLEXOS Cloud Burst gives access reserve computing — up to 20% faster than on-premise solutions to higher processing power with the option to select different servers to execute the solution,” Small says.

On older modeling platforms, Small says that accessing more processing power wasn’t an option, so even during busy times, he was limited to the speed of his desktop computer.

Another benefit Small experienced with PLEXOS Cloud: easier geo-positioning and referencing of generation and transmission assets, which wasn’t possible in older software platforms.

Interested in learning more about how PLEXOS Cloud?  Speak to an expert today!