The market needs of today and tomorrow should define energy storage technology, design, deployment, and operations. Unfortunately, the tools that many grid planners use today were designed to represent yesterday’s grid and fail to accurately model the investment and operational needs of tomorrow’s realities. Tomorrow’s grid is subject to greater system impacts from storms, heat waves, renewable doldrums, and commodity volatility, but today’s investment models focus on “typical” weather and average conditions. Grid planners need new, advanced tools to identify the investments and operational paradigms needed to maintain reliability cost effectively across the hour-to-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week, season-to-season, and year-to-year volatility that will characterize future grids.
Form Energy’s Analytics and Software teams built a new grid modeling toolkit, Formware™, to capture the dynamics of increasingly volatile and weather-dependent grids and the value drivers of firm, dispatchable resources such as multi-day storage. We partnered with leading academic institutions to develop several of the early Formware capabilities and have documented these learnings through peer reviewed studies in top tier academic journals, collaborations with industry, and thought leadership.
Today, Formware is a fully-featured, technology-neutral resource adequacy, investment, and operational model for next generation power grids. It has the ability to optimize the investments and operations of any portfolio of technologies over multi-year, hourly resolution data sets to capture real-world volatility in weather, commodity, and resource availability, resulting in more reliable and cost-effective designs for power systems today and in the future. Formware is capable of optimizing least-cost asset builds, revenues, and real-time operations to help project developers, utilities, and other grid planners understand and capture the value of multi-day energy storage in future grid transformation scenarios, key to making long-term investment and real-time operational decisions.
