Capacity expansion modeling is a crucial part of power system planning. It’s the foundation of the utility’s IRP, setting a roadmap for net investments, retirements, and meeting policy goals of renewable energy production or emissions reductions. It also serves a...

Power system planning has grown in both importance and challenges in recent years. In parallel with rapid integration of variable renewable energy sources and storage, the electric industry is facing rising load growth, evolving weather and natural disaster risks, and...

The primary objective of the Montana resource adequacy (RA) assessment is to identify capacity needs for NorthWestern Energy (NWE) in the next 5-7 years given resource plan uncertainties and evolving coordination opportunities through the Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP). NWE...

California’s Senate Bill 100 sets targets of 60% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045. In December of 2020, the California Agencies SB100 report indicated that this timeline could be accelerated in a cost-effective manner; however it...

The deployment of renewable energy in Texas, particularly wind and solar, has grown significantly over the past decade. Texas has almost as much wind capacity as the next four states combined1 and ERCOT recently

The winter storm that hit Texas and the surrounding regions in February 2021 (often referred to as Winter Storm Uri) triggered one of the worst blackouts in recent history. In Texas, it was the first time that all 254 counties...

When policy discussions for the establishment of a west-wide resource adequacy program began in 2019, the leading indicators of western reliability risk were just beginning to emerge: long-planned thermal retirements, growing drought risk, and correlated heat events were increasingly dominant...

WRAP, a first-of-its-kind non-ISO regional Resource Adequacy program, represents a huge step forward toward regional reliability analysis, planning, and coordination for the non-CA West. WRAP has the potential to help address a major collective action problem for the region –...

Decarbonizing the power system is a central component of economy-wide decarbonization and climate mitigation. New Mexico is among several states that have set goals to fully decarbonize their power systems, setting a 100% clean electricity target. This study, called the...

Although New Mexico is among several states that have set goals to fully decarbonize their power systems, most states have not yet conducted a detailed evaluation of how to achieve these targets. The original moonshot set an ambitious goal of...