Power Systems Operations
Incorporating Unprecedented Visibility in Energy Technology

A broad range of regulatory requirements are driving changes in the current energy technology landscape. Additionally, companies must respond to the norms related to energy policy, emissions and climate change, price and tariff requirements, and an array of minimum service obligations. “Energy companies are constantly dealing with changes in operational rules and critical business decisions regarding pre-scheduling, scheduling and after-the-fact settlements,” states Vicki Vanderburg, Founder and President, Power Systems Operations (PSO). “We recognize that each company runs a unique business, and so our cardinal offerings focus on meeting the requirements of planning phases, all the way through system deployment and production.” PSO’s key product, VERA, provides clients with unprecedented visibility and control over the formulas and equations applied in pre-scheduling decision-making, scheduling and settlements, as well as powerful tools for managing data and moving it securely through internal and external networks.

To keep pace with the current technological trends within the energy landscape, PSO’s solutions are built on the latest industrial technology platforms. Utilizing best practices to deliver the technology that make up the VERA Suite, the company’s team of experienced energy industry experts understand the challenges that companies are facing and interact effectively with customers in solving their different levels of operational difficulties. “VERA can be licensed as Software as a Service (SaaS) product for those customers who wish to use a hosted facility. It was engineered to minimize costly one-off customizations and provide the customer with a highly intuitive graphical interface that requires little or no programming experience to use,” says Vanderburg.

VERA eliminates the risk of corrupted spreadsheets, stores the data in a backed-up database, and provides data access to multiple systems, thereby allowing the customer to leverage their existing systems—eliminating the need to update all legacy systems at once. The calculation tool of the VERA application suite enables customers to create and maintain the custom equations that are used throughout their operation; from forecasting needs ahead of the trade date, to real-time and settlements calculations.

In settlements, these calculations may be “shadow settlements” for an Independent System Operator (ISO) or they may be the billing information for co-owned generation, or for sub-entities within a parent organization. “Our Communicator Graphical User Interface (GUI) is used by customers to confirm that the data has been properly uploaded to the ISO’s website, reducing risk of data entry error by users,” states Vanderburg.

The company, with a mission to enable its clients to overcome hurdles in the energy technology arena, has meticulously met the business requirements of delivering affordable and high value products and services to the energy industry. On one occasion, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission mandated that the Energy Quarterly Report (EQR) be transitioned from CSV files to XML data transmitted to their systems, one of PSO’s customers was at that time responsible for reporting for over 25 different entities across their organization. With VERA, they were able to create ‘equations’ to automate the generation of the EQR filings. The validation tools helped in comparing the EQR filings to what is published by the ISOs they operate in, and it was executed in a fraction of time and with significantly less staff involvement than was previously needed to manually create and submit the CSV files.

VERA can be licensed as Software as a Service (SaaS) product for those customers who wish to use a hosted facility

VERA is designed to give end-users or their IT teams the power to keep up with changes in an ever-changing landscape on an ongoing basis. “We continue to look for opportunities to partner with consulting and system integration companies, allowing them to provide these unique and powerful tools to bring value to their customers,” concludes Vanderburg.