The Northwest Power and Conservation Council (NWPCC), the entity responsible for planning the electrical system on the Northwest Coast of the United States, approved the contracting of OptGen, PSR’s long-term expansion planning model. The software will be used in conjunction with Genesys, a probabilistic energy operation model developed in 2020 by PSR for the same entity, after winning an international competition.

The Northwest Coast system is made up of four states (Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington), with around 60 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity. This system is the most complex in the USA, as it includes the hydroelectric resources of the Columbia River, with multiple environmental constraints; strong wind generation; significant natural gas thermoelectric generation, with transport and contract restrictions; and interconnections with other West Coast states, including California. As a consequence, its energy operation is one of the most challenging in the world: it requires the solution of 200 million optimization problems in a few hours. The Genesys model developed by PSR met this challenge by combining PSR’s SDDP stochastic operating model, with hourly resolution and uncertainties, and around 30 thousand processors in a cloud environment (PSR Cloud).

According to the NWPCC technical team, OptGen, together with Genesys, will allow integrated planning of the generation and transmission resources necessary to economically and reliably meet demand in the coming decades.

“The choice of OptGen as an expansion model by the NWPCC, after evaluating several options from around the world, is an important recognition of the advanced tools we have developed to face increasingly complex energy challenges, integrating renewables, distributed generation, transmission, storage, energy demand and climate impacts”, says Mario Veiga, founder and director of Innovation at PSR.

More information about OptGen can be found at this link: https://www.psr-inc.com/software/?tabId=sddp&subPanelId=sub-panel-sddp-2