Methodology Primers

How do the Council’s power planners create a 20-year power plan for the Pacific Northwest? These primers offer insights into this process by explaining our methodologies.

Read presentations and watch videos from Council meetings that spell out our approach to developing a 20-year load forecast, as well as evaluating the costs, attributes, and other aspects of power plants and demand-side resources like energy efficiency and demand response.

Finally, you can learn more about the Council’s modeling suite and our framework for how we use these modeling tools in our analysis.

• Load Forecast (and video)
  The Council is required to develop a 20-year demand forecast as part of its plan. This presentation walks through the updated approach for the Ninth Plan.
• New Resource Options – These presentations describe the Council’s approach to developing new resource options to be considered in the plan:
  • Conservation (and video)
  • Demand Response (and video)
  • Distributed Solar (and video)
  • Generating Resources (and video)
• Council’s Modeling Framework:
  • Needs Assessment (and video)
  • Regional Strategy Analysis Toolset (OptGen/SDDP) (and video)
  • Representing Markets in Council Modeling (and video)
    An overview of the current market options and the Ninth Plan will seek to represent any market decisions in its modeling.
  • Primer on Market Availability Study (and video)