Energy Market Analysis & Modeling

CRA uses the Aurora model and its proprietary North American Electricity and Environment (NEEM) model to evaluate the impacts of emission policy on the power sector.  NEEM is a flexible, bottom-up partial equilibrium model of the North American electricity market that can simultaneously model both system expansion and environmental compliance over a long time period.

CRA uses its proprietary Natural Gas Fundamentals model and licenses the GPCM tool to produce fundamentals-based natural gas price forecasts at key delivery points throughout North America and the world. CRA’s modeling framework allows for efficient scenario development based on changing assumptions for resource base, production costs, demand by sector, and pipeline and import/export infrastructure. CRA also provides clients with internally consistent oil and coal commodity and transport outlooks.

Our experts regularly provide strategic guidance and advisory services to energy asset owners and investors who require robust valuation of generation assets and storage facilities, commodity contracts, and energy derivatives. CRA experts also provide clients guidance on energy risk management, deal structuring, hedging strategies, and portfolio optimization.

CRA’s power market models evaluate asset-level dispatch and utility-level portfolio accounting to support valuation and resource planning analyses. Our tools are flexible and adaptable to evolving market conditions and are often deployed with advanced capabilities such as stochastic risk analysis and sub-hourly granularity.

As the power generation mix shifts towards higher concentrations of intermittent resources, CRA has evolved its tools to assess resource adequacy needs and operating reserve and flexibility requirements. Using Aurora and a proprietary sub-hourly resource adequacy model, CRA performs loss of load studies, flexibility resource needs analysis, and ancillary service requirement assessments.

CRA’s proprietary PERFORM model is used for electric and gas utilities to develop bottom-up revenue requirement projections based on load growth expectations, operations and maintenance cost forecasts, and future capital expenditures across the generation, transmission, and distribution segments.  The tool can be used to benchmark rate growth expectations against peer utilities.

CRA’s proprietary stochastic development models have been used by clients to assess uncertainty in key market drivers and ensure decisions are robust in the face of a growing number of market risks. CRA’s stochastic development tools are regularly updated to reflect emerging risk profiles, primarily related to daily and hourly uncertainty in natural gas prices, electric power market prices, and wind and solar generation output.

CRA’s proprietary Energy Storage Operations (ESOP) model is used to evaluate the future value stack for storage resources. ESOP computes optimal storage resource revenues based on participation in energy (day-ahead and real-time) and ancillary services markets (such as regulation, spinning reserves, and non-spinning reserves). Compared to hourly production cost models, ESOP has the advantage of making more granular settlement interval (5-minute) operating decisions along with a more robust representation of technical parameters (storage capacity, round-trip efficiency, cycling costs, charge and discharge rates, depth of discharge limitations) and constraints imposed by market rules.

For utility operators, investors, and policymakers, reliable and robust projections of electricity markets are often the basis for many critical decisions, including budgeting, investment strategy, and resource planning. CRA licenses the Aurora model in North America and the Kyos model in Europe to provide clients with perspectives on future power market dynamics, including clearing prices, the generation mix, and the changing dynamics associated with increases in intermittent resource deployment.