Result description
The energy industry is undergoing a significant transformation fueled by technological advancements, increasing demands, and ambitious policy objectives, all involving the integration of renewable sources, the evolution of gas networks towards hydrogen, and the enhancement of heating and cooling systems. To manage this complexity, encoord GmbH has developed the “Scenario Analysis Interface for Energy Systems” (SAInt), a comprehensive software platform to facilitate coordinated energy system planning. Now, utility planners can integrate planning across electric generation, transmission, and distribution by transitioning between balanced and unbalanced AC power flow simulations and production cost optimizations, or quantifying the economic value and risks of new projects by running capacity expansion and production cost optimizations. Engineers can perform hydraulic simulations of gas networks with any gas composition. Thermal simulations allow analyzing heating and cooling networks, planning for expansions, or exploring fluid temperature changes to migrate to the 5th generation of district heating, all in the same software.
Addressing target audiences and expressing needs
- Business partners – SMEs, Entrepreneurs, Large Corporations
- Expanding to more markets /finding new customers
- Business Angels
- Reaching out to prospective customers in the energy utility sector, in the energy assets investing/planning sector.
- To further extend thermal/cooling capabilities and consolidate the software functionalities for data/model integration.
- Other Actors who can help us fulfil our market potential
- Academia/ Universities
- Private Investors
R&D, Technology and Innovation aspects
The software is already in use by a solid base of clients but the thermal and cooling module is at its initial stage of development. The module requires to extend the set of functionalities with new objects and properties, to consolidate the integration with the electricity/gas modules for a “combined” simulations, and to implement more advanced reporting tools.
As a software house, encoord GmbH commercializes SAInt as a set of modules to better fit the customer’s needs in terms of modelling physical networks (gasses, electricity or thermal energy) or energy markets (using production cost models or capacity expansion models). A SAInt license is a “non-perpetual” time-defined license allowing a customer to use up to a maximum number of instances purchased for each module and up to the agreed expiration date. Discounts are foreseen based on volume and subscription length. Existing customers have free access to customer support and too hotfixes or new releases up to the end of their subscription. A free trial program is available for users to test the software. This model allows for the meeting of the needs of small companies up to big corporations and is replicable for a small to large number of customers.
As a side activity we also carry out consultant projects using our software for energy utilities planning for electrification of gas loads or grid expansion.
We do want to provide more specialised modules (e.g., import of data, export of data, export of results, automatization of specific tasks) in the future, so to enlarge the portfolio. However, the underlying business model will be the same but possibly expanded with more consultancy activities.
We do not see space for any change in the license model or the way our software is commercialised.
- Global
- North America
