Situation
NIPSCO needed to develop a long-term resource strategy capable of meeting customer needs while navigating significant uncertainty around commodity prices, environmental requirements, technology costs, load growth, market conditions, and the future performance of its existing generation fleet. The company sought a planning approach that could rigorously evaluate these uncertainties and identify a resource portfolio that balanced affordability, reliability, flexibility, and risk.
Approach
CRA’s Energy Practice has supported NIPSCO’s integrated resource planning since 2017, combining fundamental power and commodity market analysis, load forecasting, scenario and stochastic analysis, and detailed portfolio modeling. CRA also helped integrate actual market information from competitive resource solicitations into the planning process, allowing potential investments to be evaluated using real-world project costs and characteristics. The analysis compared alternative portfolios across a wide range of potential futures and provided a structured framework for evaluating the key economic, reliability, environmental, and strategic tradeoffs.
Result
The work provided the analytical foundation for a major transformation of NIPSCO’s generation portfolio. The 2018 IRP supported the decision to retire the company’s remaining coal generation and replace it with a portfolio better aligned with NIPSCO’s economic and strategic objectives. CRA has continued to support subsequent IRPs and implementation of the resulting generation strategy, helping NIPSCO adapt its resource plan as market conditions, technologies, regulations, and customer needs evolve.
