Grid Modeling Toolkit

Pioneering new grid modeling tools for a clean energy future

Form Energy is driven by the notion that the market needs of today and tomorrow should define multi-day energy storage technology specifications. To that end, at founding, Form Energy sought to use existing capacity expansion models to understand the needs and dynamics of zero and near-zero carbon, high renewables grids, a large and quickly growing segment of the market. After surveying the landscape of available commercial models, we found that incumbent tools were unable to capture the dynamics of decarbonizing grids and the drivers of the need for and value of multi-day energy storage. Grid planners need tools that identify the investments necessary to maintain reliability across the hour to hour, day to day, week to week, season to season, and year to year variability that characterizes high renewables grids.

Form Energy’s analytics and software teams built a new grid modeling toolkit, Formware™, to capture the dynamics of decarbonizing grids and the drivers of multi-day storage value. Our co-founders partnered with leading academic institutions to develop several of the early Formware capabilities. These learnings have been documented in top tier academic journals.

We have since developed Formware to be a next-generation, technology-neutral investment and operational model for 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 weather variability, resulting in more reliable and cost effective designs for renewables-driven power systems. Formware is capable of optimizing least cost asset builds 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 decisions.