NY Value of Distributed Energy Resources (VDER) Value Stack Calculator

Sustainable Energy Advantage (SEA) offers a customized version of NYSERDA’s open-source New York Value of Distributed Energy Resources (VDER) Value Stack Calculator via license.  NYSERDA’s publicly available calculator estimates project revenue based on three (3) years of backward-looking historical wholesale market energy and capacity prices.

SEA has customized the VDER Value Stack Calculator to make it forward-looking.  Our custom calculator incorporates a range of our own forward-looking energy and capacity price outlooks, which provide a more informative and useful representation of future revenue than relying upon historical prices does. SEA populates the calculator with its own forward-looking energy and capacity price outlooks for all the NYISO zones through 2055. If a user acquires third-party forecasts of energy and capacity prices, those can easily be incorporated as inputs and used to model revenue on a monthly and annual basis.

Additionally, SEA provides ongoing support to help users set up cases and interpret results (and optionally run the cases for you).

SEA provides the Customized VDER Value Stack Calculator in versions for:

• • stand-alone solar

• • stand-alone storage and solar paired with storage

Highlighted modeling improvements incorporated into SEA’s customized VDER Value Stack Calculator

• Energy and Capacity Wholesale Price Inputs
  • 25-year forward-looking hourly energy (LBMP) and monthly capacity prices (versus three years of historic prices available in the stock calculator).
• Capacity Alternative 3 Revenue
  • Payments disbursed monthly consistent with the in-practice billing logistics (versus one annual lump sum in the stock calculator).
  • Projects utilizing the Alternative 3 capacity rate receive the Alternative 1 rate for capacity payments during the first project year per the VDER tariff (because their performance during the peak load hour in the prior year is undetermined).
• Capacity Accreditation
  • Allows for adjustments to capacity payments based on recent NYISO market capacity accreditation changes that theoretically should (but have yet to) flow through to VDER capacity revenue calculations.
• Energy Storage Project Parameters
  • Accommodates a user provided a custom battery degradation curve provided.
  • Allows users to set state-of-charge (SOC) limitations (absent from the stock calculator).
• Storage Charging / Dispatch Logic Enhancements
  • Optionally compute retail rates for battery charging based on wholesale energy price forecasts (versus a fixed retail rate escalator divorced from wholesale energy prices).
  • Adjust standalone storage billing demand for charging costs to better reflect utility billing practices and BESS operations by calculating demand charges based on instantaneous hourly load during charging events (versus using rolling averages of demand to calculate charging cost as provided in the stock calculator). This is relevant for modeling BESS projects with the ability to virtually instantaneous ramp-up/ramp-down.

Coming Soon:

• Refined dispatch modeling of hybrid projects with an DC:AC ratio greater than 1, such that “clipped” energy will be used to charge the BESS.
• Additional user-experience improvements related to DC capacity inputs.

Contact our team (Tom Michelman, Eric Pinsker-Smith, and Yasin Naman) for more details, or an online demonstration.