Electric system market modelers and reliability analysts, your moment has arrived. The encoord team proudly presents SAInt 3.9, the definitive platform for flexible interconnection studies and integrated generation and transmission planning.
Highlights of SAInt 3.9
SAInt 3.9 brings substantial additions to the production cost and reserve capabilities, enabling full-detail, precise security-constrained unit commitment and economic dispatch for market clearing. AC power flow functionality is greatly improved with a comprehensive switched shunt control implementation and a host of new convergence tools and settings. Combined with an expanded plugin ecosystem, a new Node Explorer, and a deeper integrated planning core built on a new DC power flow module and Integrated Planner API endpoints, version 3.9 further defines SAInt as the definitive platform for flexible interconnection studies and integrated planning.
Market Optimizations
In alignment with real markets, SAInt 3.9 significantly expands how generation commitment and reserves are modeled.
Commitment status and start-up detail:
Commitment status, cycling or must-run, is now specified directly, with a dedicated start-up ramp rate and separate cold, warm, and hot time-dependent start-up costs.
Expanded reserve products:
Reserve service modeling now spans up and down, spinning and regulation participation, with minimum contribution values that support optional commitment behavior into reserve provisions.
Non-spinning reserves:
De-committed units with rapid turn-on capability can now provide reserves, capturing fast-start generating units.
Network Modeling
The AC power flow domain gains a major expansion of controls and solver flexibility.
Switched shunt modeling:
Multi-level discrete and continuous control, with remote node control extended to shunt devices and to wind, solar, and battery assets.
Customizable warm start:
Initialize simulations from external data, a previous SAInt solution, or voltage angles from an automatic DC power flow run.
Decoupled solver control:
Independent iteration limits and switching tolerances for voltage control mode, shunt switching, transformer taps, light-loading steps, and participation switching, with extensive new logging for each.
Plugin Ecosystem
The plugin ecosystem keeps growing, now with a one-step install that places dedicated plugin icons directly in the toolbar.
New and updated plugins:
The suite now includes the Representative Timestep Selector, a Resource Adequacy tool with probabilistic transmission outages, a fully updated Contingency Analyzer, major additions to Dot Raw to SAInt, and a new Translation Validator for comparing external datasets against SAInt models.
Unified reporting:
Reporting design is now consistent across all plugins, making cross-domain analysis easy.
Signed security:
Every encoord-authored plugin now passes a signed security check before it runs.
Integrated Planning Improvements
Version 3.9 deepens the integrated planning core that ties production cost modeling and power flow together.
New DC power flow module:
Screen contingencies to align monitored and contingency pairs in system-balance production cost modeling, or seed flat-start AC power flow scenarios with initial voltage angles.
Integrated Planner API:
New endpoints automate process execution and support moving between DC power flow and unbalanced AC power flow scenario types.
New Node Explorer:
An independent window with navigation tracking and cross-scenario representation makes working in large models faster and clearer.
Seasoned SAInt users, please note: InService is now an event property
The ON, OFF, and ONOFF events have been removed in SAInt 3.9. InService is now a default event value property, InServiceDef, that you can change per scenario with an InService event, which makes controlling object service status with profiles straightforward. The boolean behavior remains: use integer 0 for False and 1 for True, including within a profile. See the forum post for the full details.
👉 Download SAInt 3.9 from our User Forum!
👉 Try SAInt 3.9 through our free trial!
Documentation is available at docs.encoord.com.