What separates a good optimiser from the rest?

The optimiser is the brain of an energy investment  

It’s the step in the process that takes in all the physical and commercial forecasts and constraints for a project and looks to optimise the behaviour of the assets to deliver the best commercial outcome for the owner. Whether you're running simulations for planning purposes, as our clients do, or executing real-time asset control and market trading, you need an optimiser. How good it is can have a huge impact on your project’s financial performance.

Look at these two scenarios:

1. A behind-the-meter solar and battery storage investment at a C&I site in NSW
2. A front-of-meter solar and battery storage project, also in NSW

On the left are the commercial returns for one year of the project modelled in Gridcog. On the right the commercial returns from another modelling tool in the market.

What's the difference?

Advanced optimisation that considers all relevant market opportunities, the full picture and finds better asset dispatch and trading plans. In all other respects the models are identical in terms of physical, financial and forecasting assumptions (all models are run with perfect foresight).

While basic platforms might deliver adequate results, “good” optimisation (like we do at Gridcog) can boost economic returns by up to 40%.

How do we do this?

Three ways:

• By fully modelling revenue streams and site and asset constraints - from multiple wholesale energy markets, to the full suite of ancillary services, to complex transmission and distribution tariffs. Crucially we can reflect all of the relevant market rules associated with these services. Without reflecting these accurately modelling can be off by over 100%
• Optimising multiple co-located resources as a unified system, including generation, storage, flexible load, and vehicle charging, not looking at battery assets in isolation
• Deploying the most powerful available commercial solvers and significant compute resources to truly find optimal solutions - mimicking the complex algorithms on trading desks

So remember, better optimisation = better returns.

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