Using a cost-reconstruction tool to analyze historical system operation

The authors describe the software tools that are currently used at Southern Company Services, Inc. (SCS) to perform postanalysis and present two case studies to illustrate the use of the tools in the day-to-day operating environment. This postanalysis practice has proved to be very effective in enhancing the cost awareness among system dispatchers and sharpening their intuitive knowledge about overall system economics. By running postanalysis on a daily basis, SCS observed a number of concrete benefits: (1) with postanalysis, dispatchers have concrete feedback on how well the system was dispatched the previous day; (2) a target ration can be established to monitor the real-time pool performance; and (3) through postanalysis, the benefits for improving various aspects of system operation can be easily and reliably quantified.<>