REPORT TO COUNCIL
SUBJECT
Title
Agreement for Services with CPMAXIS Inc. to Provide Modeling, Development, Validation and Reporting of PAGES for the Electric Department's Power Trading Resource Management
Report
BACKGROUND
Power market trading began in California in the late 1990s after deregulation legislation was passed. City of Santa Clara's Electric Utility, Silicon Valley Power (SVP), power trading program has been utilizing the ACES Power Operations software application (ACES) as their power trading and scheduling software tool to conduct its trading business since SVP was authorized to engage in power market trading in 1999. The software allows SVP to correlate hundreds of financial trades with counterparties against actual meter reads at the end of each month for transaction validation, purchase power settlement billing, gas, carbon allowance, and capacity purchases and sales, and to calculate and validate all California Independent System Operator (CAISO) related schedules. Over $91 million in SVP transactions scheduled through the CAISO were validated and settled in 2018.
DISCUSSION
In 2017, it was recognized that ACES was reaching its end of life as a maintainable software product and staff studied other options. The parent company for the ACES software product, SunGard AS, no longer maintains this particular product for customers and has sought to migrate customers to other products. Earlier this year SunGard filed for bankruptcy and restructuring with its creditors.
During the same time period, the Northern California Power Agency (NCPA) developed a new power scheduling and settlement application known as PAGES. Because of the CAISO scheduling requirement of a single scheduling coordinator, SVP provides its ACES schedules to NCPA which then integrates those schedules with the rest of NCPA's power pool and submits the results to the CAISO. As PAGES was being developed, NCPA made this software application available to all its members, inclu...
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