ROAM Consulting's 2-4-C Lite

A powerful dispatch engine wrapped within an easy-to-use user interface.

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An Introduction

Since soon after the start of the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM) in 1998, ROAM Consulting has been providing forecasts to a large number of market participants including retailers, generators and transmission operators, and the market operator, NEMMCO.

 

This forecasting is made possible by ROAM Consulting’s own 2-4-C (“To Foresee”) Simulation software. The software, written entirely in-house, has been constantly updated to keep up with the ongoing addendums and modifications to the NEM rules.

 

Using the same dispatch engine used in ROAM’s market leading NEM forecasts, 2-4-C Lite provides a comprehensive and accurate market simulation with almost all the features of ROAM’s 2-4-C package. The package uses Microsoft Excel to interact with the input data, providing a familiar and easy to use interface to a comprehensive data set.

 

The 2-4-C Lite package also includes detailed results analysis tools, which may quickly generate graphics and figures including:

  • Pool prices
  • Generation dispatch
  • Inter-regional transmission flows
  • Inter- and Intra-regional transmission constraints

Finally, results can be viewed in almost any degree of granularity, including average time of day, time of month, annual, seasonal and half-hourly.

Supply

Generators

Each generator is modelled separately to ensure a high level of accuracy. The individual details include:

  • The relevant logical station group
  • Physical thermal limits for winter and summer
  • Marginal Loss Factor (for automatic bidding adjustment)
  • Forced outage statistics (for use within the embedded Monte Carlo engine)
  • Maintenance schedule/s (repeated yearly)

Bidding

In order for the generators to offer into the market, the classic bid format is used. This includes:

  • Weekend or weekday flag
  • Date of first application
  • 10 bid bands comprising of load and price pairs

Demand

Load

Each region has distinct load characteristics. This comprises of time-of-day load 'shapes', total annual energy, and seasonal peak demands.

 

By using ROAM Consulting's Load Trace Synthesizer (LTS), a user can produce the above desired characteristics using historical load traces along with user definable targets.

 

Included with the 2-4-C Lite package is a set of pre-calculated (by the LTS tool) load traces:

  • M10 load trace for the period 2009/10 - 2018/19
  • M50 load trace for the period 2009/10 - 2018/19

 

The targets used for these traces have come from NEMMCO's latest SOO.

Delivery

Transmission

As the 2-4-C dispatch engine mimics the real-time NEMDE operation, only the inter-regional connectors are modelled explicitly.

 

Each interconnector is defined with:

  • from node definition
  • to node definition
  • nominal thermal limits (overridden by the constraints; see below)
  • latest Inter-Regional Loss Factors (IRLF's)

Constraints

In order to model the limitations on intra- and inter-regional transmission flow paths 2-4-C Lite utilises the latest ANTS constraints, which incorporates the full system normal set of pre- and post-contingency, voltage and transient stability constraints.

 

These sets are checked thoroughly by ROAM Consulting before adding them into the model. Each constraint is also checked for viable new entrants which are then automatically mapped to any new units / stations a user might add, keeping the constraints fully up-to-date.

Uncertainty

Monte Carlo engine

“The future ain't what it used to be.” - Yogi Berra

 

Although the market cannot be predicted with 100% confidence, you can forecast a number of possible futures, and then apply statistical analysis to derive ranges, confidence intervals and averages.

 

2-4-C Lite includes an embedded Monte Carlo engine that uses a class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling. This is then used with the individual forced outage statistics for each generation unit to create separate full and partial outage schedules, which are unique for each future simulated.

More Information

For any enquiries please email us at: 24clite@roamconsulting.com.au