PSR has officially released OptGen 8.0, its expansion planning model. OptGen is a global benchmark used by ministries, regulatory agencies, planning departments of public companies, and private players worldwide. The model is licensed to Brazil’s Energy Planning Company (EPE).

The main objective of OptGen is to support countries globally to conduct integrated energy planning systematically, especially for a cleaner, affordable, flexible, and resilient energy future. In this context, the word resilience draws a lot of attention. It consists of the system’s ability to attenuate the impact of very severe events and accelerate the recovery of normal operating conditions.

In this sense, the main functionality of this new version is incorporating resilience in expansion planning. This option uses extreme scenarios informed by the user and aims to ensure continuity of supply, assuming the occurrence of each scenario: droughts and very severe temperatures due to climate change; prolonged reduction in the renewable generation; interruptions in fuel imports; the prolonged output of large generation trunks, etc.

PSR engineer Fernanda Thomé explains: “OptGen allows the co-optimization of the sum of investment costs and the expected value of the operating costs, representing both probabilistic and extreme aspects in an integrated manner.”

Other features that deserve to be highlighted are: (i) new candidate projects: concentrated solar power plants (CSPs) and hydrogen and electrification processes; (ii) new expansion plan dashboard: very informative, including investment and operating results; and (iii) full integration with NetPlan 4.0 for detailed transmission expansion planning studies.

The complete description of all features in this release is available at: http://psr-energy.com/software/optgen-8.0.html. Check it out!