Integrate Power Market Analysis into the early stages of your site selection process. This powerful tool visualizes and evaluates nodal pricing, basis risk, and other key metrics for any Point of Interconnection (POI).
Optimize your site analysis
PVcase Prospect's Power Market Analysis helps identify the most profitable grid areas by understanding the energy market landscape. There are different ways in which you can use it to optimize your site analysis.
More specifically, you can use it to:
- View historical nodal pricing, min/max spread, and negative price hours at a specific POI
- View full node-to-hub basis risk details for a specific POI
- View & export granular LMP pricing data (“12 by 24”)
- Save a specific pricing node to the project as a substation
Below you’ll see the detailed steps for each case.
View historical nodal pricing, min/max spread, and negative price hours at a specific POI
- Open the layer catalog, and search for the LMP layers.
- Select desired LMP layer:
- Based on your use case, this can be Total Average or Solar Weighted Average
- Choose the desired year (or select the three-year average layer)
- Click on the colored point on the map closest to the target POI to see the LMP details for that specific node (substation bus). The pop-up will include details on:
- Node name
- Historical price (LMP)
- Basis Average
- 4hr min/max spread - high $ price spread indicates better location for battery arbitrage
- Count of negative price hours - high number indicates possible curtailment risk
- Metadata about the node (ISO, Zone, Status, Node type: Load or Generation)
Generally speaking, look at whichever node is electrically closest. If there are both Load and Generation nodes nearby, then look at whichever node fits your use case (e.g., solar → Generation node; data center → Load node). However, always prioritize the electrically closest node. For a generator, if the nearest node is solely a load node, use that price instead of one further away.
View full node-to-hub basis risk details for a specific POI
For hub-settled PPAs, it’s important to evaluate node-to-hub basis risk early on to avoid financial risk for PPA. Basis calculations show how the nodal pricing at the node moves versus the “hub” average price).
- In the LMP pop-up, click the View Basis Details button to see the full basis calculations table.
- In the Basis Details table, look at the Basis ($) column to see how the node has traded versus the hub price. Note: the table shows the basis for the same node versus all the hubs in the region and for each year of data. Choose whichever hub region you expect the PPA to be based off of.
Generators: Financial risk increases if nodal price is far below hub price. Target positive basis $ values (that is, the node has historically traded above the hub price where the PPA settles). Data centers: Financial risk increases if nodal price is far above hub price. Target low or negative basis $ value (that is, the node has historically traded below the hub price where the PPA settles).
View & export granular LMP pricing data (12 by 24)
For deeper financial analysis, you can view and export detailed historical nodal pricing data: hourly pricing for each month of the selected year (12 by 24s).
- In the nodal pricing pop-up, click View LMP 12 by 24
- To export the data, click Export CSV
Save a specific pricing node to the project as a substation
You can save a target pricing node to a project as a substation: Click Add to Project in the nodal pricing pop up.