Adica - Generation Expansion

Adica is an industry leader in providing Smart Marketsm strategic analysis software and decision support for energy companies and government agencies worldwide. Our innovative generation expansion software, developed in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, enables strategic analysis of both electricity markets and regulated power systems.

Most traditional generation expansion software products are based on centralized least-cost planning. From a modeling point of view, the centralized perspective is convenient since one objective function can be used to optimize the entire generation system. However, the centralized least-cost planning approach does not reflect how investment decisions are made in today’s electricity markets, where several GenCos are competing with each other, both in terms of short-run operations and in long-term capacity expansion.

EMCAS is a Smart Marketsm software product that uses a new multi-agent modeling approach for generation expansion in electricity markets. The software simulates generation investment decisions of decentralized generating companies (GenCos) interacting in a complex, multidimensional environment. A probabilistic dispatch algorithm calculates prices and profits for new candidate units in different future states of the system. Uncertainties in future load, hydropower conditions, and competitors’ actions are represented in a scenario tree, and decision analysis is used to identify the optimal expansion decision for each individual GenCo.

Contact Adica to request a report documenting an EMCAS generation expansion analysis conducted for the Korean power system under different assumptions about market design, market concentration, and GenCo’s expectations about their competitors’ investment decisions.