COBALT (Control and Operations Balancing Authority Logistics Toolkit)

COBALT is PCE's state-of-the-art suite of tools to:

• Manage resources
• Ensure resource sufficiency
• Enable data exchange and precise communication between
  • PGC/Enstorm
  • Unit commitment and other forecasts
  • Dispatchers/Reliability Coordinators
  • Generation Planners
  • Transmission Analysts
  • Plant staff
  • Post-analysis systems and staff

Why does every Balancing Authority need COBALT?

An organization as complex as a Balancing Authority divides responsibilities between numerous positions and teams. Each team is often working with a limited set of information, without full access to data from other teams that would produce a more accurate understanding of the organization's needs and how to best act in furtherance of its objectives.

COBALT acts as a hub for multiple teams and roles to operate upon a common dataset in order to achieve a clear and unified vision for the generation control process, from planning, to real-time operation, to post-analysis and quality control.

COBALT features and components include:

• Capability declarations
  • COBALT provides a means for generating units to declare their availability and capabilities (maximum power, ramp rate, etc.) in different equipment configurations. Declarations leverage various automated inputs, such as the weather forecast.
• Instructions
  • COBALT makes it easy for plants and system operators to work from a common understanding of which configuration changes need to happen and at what time. Instructions can be exported from a generation plan, providing an initial schedule of configuration changes, and then instructions can be modified, added, or removed as needed. Instructions can also easily be issued to multiple units at once in the event that urgent communication is needed. Unlike phone instructions, COBALT instructions provide a clear record of communication for later analysis and auditing.
• Numerous scoring tools
  • COBALT ships with several scoring tools to evaluate accuracy of capability declarations, quality of response to instructions, and the quality of regulation and contingency response. Such tools can be used in conjunction with six sigma to improve many aspects of the commitment and generation control process.
  • Scorers can be configured to email alerts to certain lists of users, based on specified sets of scores and respective thresholds.
• Obligation Analyzer
  • This is a tool for helping clients to gather statistics on their "obligation" (the generation required to bring Area Control Error to 0). The variability of obligation within different time windows can be used to determine ancillary service needs, and can be tracked to monitor the impact of particular influences such as frequency, load changes, or renewable unit generation swings.
• RESTful APIs
  • The core objective of COBALT is enhancing communication among teams, roles, and processes. To facilitate that objective, COBALT makes its information available to our clients' existing processes by means of RESTful APIs. COBALT can also be customized to import information from client processes and make it part of COBALT's unified data model.

Many optional modules are also available for COBALT, including:

• Renewable Curtailment Forecaster & Analyzer
  • COBALT takes generation scheduling information to determine likely future solar curtailments along with their magnitude.
• HERACAL (Heat Rate Calculator)
  • HERACAL uses unit-specific models in conjunction with weather data and other available inputs and biases to maintain an up-to-date set of current and future heat rate curves for units.

COBALT has a sophisticated user management system to control access to specific COBALT functions, with roles for oversight and auditing.

Request More Information/Ask a Question

*Name:
†Email Address:
†Phone:
*Company:
Question:
* denotes required field.
† denotes that one of the marked fields is required.