Platform overview

This page introduces Tensor Cloud: what it does, why we built it, and the building blocks you work with on the platform. Independent power producers, investors, and buyers of green electricity use it to work with each other and with their renewable energy portfolios.

What is Tensor Cloud?

Tensor Cloud is a web platform for managing the finances and operations of renewable energy portfolios. Its users include asset developers, asset managers, O&M providers, market operation and trading teams, lenders, and equity investors, who can all work on the same data in one place.

Tensor Cloud currently supports solar photovoltaic power plants and battery storage. Hydro and biomass power plants are also available when enabled for your workspace; contact Tensor to enable them. Besides a digital twin of each asset, you can model the PPAs, SPVs, and balancing groups that make up a portfolio.

Tensor Cloud simplifies or automates much of the work in the development, financing, and operating phases of a renewable asset's life, so a small team can manage a large portfolio and spend less time on repetitive tasks.

Its main features are:

• Long-term techno-economic simulation of solar and battery assets
• Up to 14-day solar generation forecasts, updated up to 10 times a day
• Battery charge and discharge schedule optimization
• Creating JEPX day-ahead trading plans and submitting spot bids to JEPX automatically
• Submitting balancing market offers to EPRX
• Submitting generation, sales, and procurement plans to the TSO (via OCCTO)
• Access to market and grid data

Tensor Cloud is built for large portfolios of hundreds or thousands of distributed assets. When you add a new solar plant, for example, it gets a generation forecast from the next forecast run, based on a physical simulation until enough measured data exists to train its machine-learning model.

Why does Tensor Cloud exist?

We want new renewable energy capacity to be installed faster around the world. In our own work as renewable energy developers, consultants, and operations and finance professionals, we found that slow, closed, and disconnected software holds the industry back. We believe an open platform built on current technology, with transparent pricing, can speed up the energy transition considerably, and Tensor Cloud is our attempt to let teams deploy faster and scale their portfolios.

How does Tensor Cloud work?

Tensor Cloud creates a digital twin of your asset portfolio. You can add more information to it, such as PPA terms, detailed technical specifications, market assumptions, and real-time operational data. Some of this happens automatically, for example when you connect Tensor Cloud to your monitoring systems; the rest you upload or enter directly on the platform.

During development, you can simulate how an asset is likely to perform over its lifetime under different market conditions or contract terms, or when it is connected to other assets such as co-located battery storage. You can share the simulation results with investors, PPA offtakers, or other external parties in a few clicks.

Once the asset is built and connected to the grid, your teams can use Tensor Cloud for its day-to-day operation, including forecasting, regulatory reporting, and energy trading.

Tensor Cloud ingests and stores real-time generation data from your asset so you can compare actual and predicted performance at any time. Our machine-learning models also use this data to improve forecast accuracy and to warn you early of equipment failure.

Tensor Cloud is designed mainly for developing, financing, and managing FIP assets and PPAs at scale, but you can also onboard and manage legacy FIT assets that have been operating for years.

Building blocks

Assets, SPVs, PPAs, BGs, and scenarios are the basic building blocks of your portfolio on Tensor Cloud. You can add, edit, and delete them as you need.

Assets

An asset on Tensor Cloud is a group of components, such as solar PV systems, batteries, loads, or hydro or biomass plants, that share a grid connection point.

SPVs

Special purpose vehicles (SPVs) are legal entities that own and operate renewable energy assets, keeping them separate from the owner's other business activities. On Tensor Cloud you can group assets under SPVs to simulate their financial performance together, and model each SPV's debt and equity structure in detail, which helps with the financial modeling of large portfolios.

PPAs

A power purchase agreement (PPA) is a contract between a buyer of green electricity and the seller or owner of the assets that generate it. You can create and manage PPAs on Tensor Cloud, and a single PPA can bundle hundreds of assets. You can simulate individual assets as well as large portfolios that supply electricity from hundreds of assets. When you change the terms of a PPA, the economic results of every attached asset change with it.

BGs

Because Tensor Cloud also covers the operation of power plants and batteries, you can create and manage balancing groups on the platform. Tensor Cloud uses balancing group information to trade and balance your assets automatically.

Scenarios

A scenario on Tensor Cloud holds assumptions about how the economy and the energy market will develop, covering the main drivers of asset value such as electricity prices, inflation rates, and curtailment. You can write fully custom assumptions, or use the built-in ones based on public data from government ministries and industry associations.

You can create as many scenarios as you like, but each asset is assigned only one scenario at a time. Changing a scenario changes the simulated results of every asset assigned to it. To see how an asset would perform under different market conditions, simulate it under different scenarios and compare the results.

Tensor Cloud has a default scenario that every new asset is assigned when it is created.