PSR has officially released SDDP 17.1, its mid- and long-term stochastic operative optimization model. SDDP is a global benchmark and is currently applied in more than seventy countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Africa, including some of the world’s largest systems such as the NordPool, US West Coast, Canada and Brazil. In Brazil, the model is licensed to the Energy Planning Company (EPE) and the National Electric System Operator (ONS).

The main functionality of this new version is the detailed modeling of Concentrated Solar Power plants (CSPs). The general idea of a CSP is that solar irradiation is reflected by mirrors that focus sunlight on a receiver in which a fluid is heated in a thermally insulated tank. When the plant is started, the fluid leaves the tank and generates steam, which drives a turbine to produce electricity.

Through the integration of SDDP with Time Series Lab 2.0 (TSL), which is PSR’s renewable modeling tool, the user will be able to model in detail the CSP’s solar field through an optical efficiency table and create a synthetic historical record of 40 years of hourly generation using reanalysis databases: MERRA2 and ERA5.

PSR engineer Ricardo Perez explains: “The global decarbonization target to control temperature rise and other climate events will require the massive adoption of different electricity production technologies and in this sense, concentrated solar power plants (CSPs) are a good alternative especially in areas with high direct solar irradiation. Through the co-optimization of the hourly dispatch, storage (which is usually intra-daily) and reserve performed by SDDP, the user will be able to analyze in detail the effects of CSPs on the systems operation”.

Other features that deserve to be highlighted are: (i) PSRIO, which is a tool for post-processing outputs and creating dashboards customized by users, and (ii) PowerView, which is a map with georeferenced information about the electrical network, which allows, therefore, to plot circuit power flows, bus marginal costs, generation and other SDDP results in an intuitive, colorful, and graphical way.

A complete description of all features available in this release can be found here: http://psr-energy.com/software/sddp-17.1.html. Check it out!