Ascend Analytics (“Ascend”), the leading provider of market intelligence and analytics solutions for the energy transition, today announced the launch of PowerVAL, its next generation product for providing developers, investors and utilities with energy project valuation across all generation assets and geographies. PowerVAL significantly expands the functionality of Ascend’s market-leading BatterySIMM energy project valuation tool to now encompass solar, storage, wind, hybrid and thermal projects. The new suite of offerings also expands Ascend’s Market Intelligence capabilities to include wholesale market outlooks modeled across 50,000 U.S. nodes as well as retail rate outlooks, supporting development of projects such as community solar. PowerVAL’s expanded market analytics, insights and operational functionality:
- Maximize revenue through bankable wholesale and retail price forecasts, stacked revenue projections, and modeled operations
- Model revenue for all physical asset attributes & ISO market rules
- Conduct full financial evaluation against either market prices or retail rates
- Value distributed assets and portfolios including community solar & storage, behind the meter assets, post-PPA revenue assessments, virtual power plants (VPPs), and aggregated distributed assets, including FERC 2222
- Determine optimal project/portfolio siting & sizing
The combination of these expanded and integrated capabilities enables PowerVAL to determine the value of projects at specific locations by performing comprehensive dispatch simulations and optimizing system operations to match specific customer use cases. PowerVAL’s valuations and outlooks are anchored on Ascend’s Opportunity Cost Forecasting framework, reflecting the pricing dynamics associated with weather-driven volatility and long-term equilibrium.
“As the energy transition progresses, evolving market and policy dynamics are creating new opportunities for a range of generation assets across the United States and Europe,” said Gary Dorris, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of Ascend. “PowerVAL is the next step in Ascend’s twenty-year journey to help power market participants understand and harness these dynamics across real time to multi-decade time horizons and from the nodal all the way to the market level.”
Launched as load growth forecasts continue to increase, driven by power intensive AI data centers, reshoring of manufacturing, and electrification, PowerVAL provides asset developers, operators and financiers with advanced software tools for optimizing financial performance, while navigating the energy transition’s increasing complexity. Additional information on PowerVAL and Ascend’s expanded capabilities can be found at: https://bit.ly/40Zvv1A
Ascend Analytics is the leading provider of market intelligence and analytics solutions for the energy transition. The company’s offerings enable decision makers in power supply, procurement, and investment markets to plan, operate, monetize, and manage risk across any energy asset portfolio. From real-time to 30-year horizons, their forecasts and insights are at the foundation of over $50 billion in project financing assessments. Ascend provides energy market stakeholders with the clarity and confidence to successfully navigate the rapidly shifting energy landscape.