A new model of incremental decision making for resource acquisition by electric utilities

Electric utilities have developed and applied several new ways to address the uncertainties they face in resource planning. In these methods, however, all the resource-acquisition decisions (e.g., construction of power plants and operation of energy-efficient programs) are made at the beginning of the simulation. This paper describes a new model that explicitly deals with the frequent, incremental nature of utility decision making. This model requires users to interact with model results and forecasts after every year or two of simulation. At that time, the user can initiate new resource acquisitions or modify past decisions (e.g., slow down construction of a power plant or change the marketing budget for an energy-efficiency program).