Background

PCE, a privately-held consulting and software development company, specializes exclusively in power system generation control. Our expertise in this specific field is unparalleled.

Our innovative software systems and consulting services enable balancing authorities to optimize control reliability and efficiency far beyond any other solution on the market. At the same time, we have tools that simply don't exist anywhere else to help market generation owners enhance profitability and compliance with market rules. Our software's effectiveness has been proven in all of the many field trials our clients have performed.

Established in 1994 by Nasser Jaleeli and Louis VanSlyck, PCE has always had a mission of increasing the efficiency of generation control across the power industry. As the first step, the founders developed new theories of interconnected operation under a contract from EPRI, providing the technical basis for the NERC CPS1 and CPS2 standards.

PCE technology enables utilities to take full advantage of the new standards and reduce costs. PCE leveraged those same theories underlying NERC standards to develop an advanced control methodology ("Priority-based Control") that powers its industry-leading automatic generation control software, Priority-based Generation Control (PGC).

We are very proud of PGC's perfect record: it has outperformed every other software in a production field trial, every client that has done an operational field trial of PGC has made the decision to continue using it full-time, and every client that has started using since we have adopted this field trial methodology in 2002, and remains in the same business, continues using it to this day! At this point, our software is helping optimize generation for electric utilities which, combined, account for about 10% of US capacity.

To help us develop and enhance PGC, we developed a number of powerful and innovative tools for control performance analysis. These tools, initially used to tune and to demonstrate PGC's capabilities, sparked interest among utility analysts desiring to refine their generation control processes. Responding to this demand, PCE has gone on to develop a wide range of visual analysis tools and proprietary KPIs for use in analyzing and optimizing generation control. We have also provided consulting to industry groups, markets, and regulated utilities in areas related to generation control, helping to make interconnection operation more efficient and reliable.

Currently, PCE is at the cutting edge of integrating renewables and energy storage resources into the generation control process, both for balancing authorities and for generation owners in markets. We recognize that the power industry is changing, and are working with our utility partners to ensure they can realize their environmental goals while boosting grid efficiency and reliability.