E3 forecasts electricity, natural gas, and retail rate prices across every major North American market. On the power side, we cover day-ahead and real-time energy, ancillary services, capacity, and renewable energy credits on an hourly basis, out 30 years. The forecasts are fundamentals-based, built from the ground up on load growth, fuel prices, resource costs, policy, transmission constraints, and market rules, and they come with the transparent assumptions behind them documented. Utilities use them for procurement and planning, developers for siting and contracting, asset owners use them for optimization and valuation, and investors and lenders for underwriting.
We model hourly dispatch across the full forecast horizon in PLEXOS (the best-in-class third-party software platform for grid modeling), calibrated against what a market is doing today, and pair it with our own models for storage dispatch, resource costs, and capacity accreditation. Results come through an interactive portal, where clients can move between the price streams and the inputs behind them, including load growth, fuel prices, technology costs, retirements, policy, transmission constraints, and the limitations we know about. We publish two editions per year and compare each one against the last, so clients working on long development timelines can see what changed and why. We also support clients with the development of custom scenarios and sensitivities as part of our normal course of business.
The forecast draws on the rest of E3’s work. Capacity accreditation assumptions come out of our resource adequacy modeling and feed the capacity price scenarios directly, build assumptions are informed by PLEXOS modeling and our resource planning studies, and policy assumptions from the people doing our policy analysis. Prices no longer track fuel costs in a straight line. What an hour is worth now depends as much on how much solar and storage sit on the system, and how they get compensated, as on the price of gas. Where a zonal view is not enough, we build nodal forecasts, technology-specific revenue models, and custom scenarios.
We have also recently launched a new interactive platform, the E3 Forecast Portal, that provides clients unique access to our forecasts. The platform is directly linked to our modeling ecosystem allowing for richer and more in-depth data access and visualization. This platform can be used for our off-the-shelf forecasts as well as for any client-specific custom cases.
Kush Patel
Stuart Mueller
Nathan Miller
Gregory Gangelhoff
