By: @Tom Thunell | Date: November 10, 2022

Context

Renewable energy projects often have long development lifecycles (2-5+ years) that require the developers of and investors in those projects to make key commercial, financial, and technical decisions years before projects become operational. Developers and investors are left to navigate uncertain future market, regulatory, and supply chain dynamics. With the near endless array of potential commercial and technical design considerations, this presents a major modeling challenge for developers to understand if a project pencils and under what scenarios. This blog post explores how developers and investors can leverage Tyba’s software platform to optimize and future-proof the design of projects.

IRA a catalyst for re-evaluating pipeline & design decisions

With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), developers and investors are revisiting their project pipeline to account for new considerations such as:

• Should I add energy storage to my project?
• Does grid charging allow me to make the economic case for upsizing the storage capacity and/or duration of my project?
• Is the PTC preferable to ITC? Does boosting DC:AC ratios to capture additional PTC value make sense?
  • Note: Tyba will be doing a follow-up deep dive on the ITC vs. PTC tradeoff.

You need flexible modeling solutions that can handle the wide range of scenarios, that can be updated on the fly, and create a shared understanding organizationally of your project (risks and upsides). In the following case study, we will walk through how you can leverage Tyba’s web application and API library to scale your modeling efforts.

Case Study - Hybrid Project in MISO

Prompt

You have a solar project in MISO’s interconnection queue. When initially submitting for interconnection, the plan was for this to be a solar-only project with 100 MWac and a 1.3 DC/AC ratio. With the IRA passage along with recent changes in MISO’s capacity market, your leadership team has come to you with the following asks and constraints.

Asks

1. Should we add energy storage to this project?
2. If so, how should storage be sized relative to solar? And what benefit do we get from DC-coupling and enabling grid charging?
3. How sensitive are the results to the assumed capacity rates? Does the move to a seasonal capacity market have an impact?
4. What configurations meet your 6% IRR hurdle rate?

Constraints

• The project cannot exceed a 100 MW POI limit.
• The project has sufficient space to fit up to 150 MWdc of solar.

Step 1: Define the set of scenarios

Based on the ask, you want to evaluate the following set of design scenarios.

In total, this translated to 72 different design options. Inputs that are fixed across all options include solar capacity (AC), module, inverter, racking, irradiance, POI, storage cycle caps, degradation, market strategy (energy + capacity), energy prices used.

Step 2: Run the analysis

Through Tyba’s web app and/or API, it is easy to setup the the analysis.

This is a screenshot from Tyba’s web application. Quickly setup the range of commercial & technical design scenarios you want to evaluate.