Nine FirmDatacenter Power Studio

How much IT load can your power actually carry?

Put gas, wind, solar, grid and batteries into one portfolio. Get the maximum supportable load, in reliability metrics your lenders and utilities already use.

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Try it: a 6-unit gas siteIllustrative portfolio
3.0
nines of supply availability99.89%
Falls short of 4 nines. Reduce load to 210 MW or add capacity.
Target:
Expected hours short per year (LOLH)
9.5 h
Max load at your target
210 MW

Snapshot demo using binomial unit outages (6% forced outage rate, 60 MW units); wind, solar and battery availability are simple assumptions here. The full engine runs hourly Monte Carlo with weather-driven renewables.

How it works: describe, simulate, decide

Three steps, the same for every analysis. The explainers below show each one.

  1. 1

    Describe the portfolio

    Gas units, wind and solar sites, the grid connection and the battery, with the IT load and your reliability target.

    See an hour-by-hour day
  2. 2

    Simulate thousands of years

    Every hour is dispatched with random outages, planned maintenance and resampled weather, so rare bad stretches show up.

    Why weather matters
  3. 3

    Read the answer and its range

    Supply availability in nines, LOLH, EUE and LOLEV, with a 95% interval that shows how settled the result is, plus reports and an Excel workbook.

    Watch an estimate settle

Keeping the load on, hour by hour

Scroll through one day. The load stays at 240 MW while the sun sets and the wind drops.

Midday Solar and wind carry most of the load. Gas output is low and the battery charges.

What supplies the datacenter right now

Illustrative dispatch for a single day. Nine Firm simulates thousands of these days, with real outages and real weather.

Weather is the real uncertainty

Each column is one day and each row is one hour of the day. Solar follows the seasons. Wind follows nothing: it stalls for days, then returns. Nine Firm resamples whole weeks of weather so these lulls stay in every simulated year.

Solar outputOne synthetic year
No outputFull output
Wind outputSame year, same site
No outputFull output

Illustrative synthetic weather, generated in your browser. Hover a cell to read it. In the product, you load your own site data.

Run it until the answer stops moving

Most simulated years have no shortfall at all, and a few are bad. One year tells you almost nothing. Nine Firm runs thousands of years, optionally repeated from independent random seeds, and shows you the estimate settle: its 95% interval narrows as years are added, so you can see when you have run enough.

Years simulated
10
Loss of load hours (LOLH)
0.00 h/yr
95% interval
± 0.00
Precision target of ±10%
Still moving

Illustrative. Each thin line is an independent run of the same simulation. The bright line is the one the readout follows.

Built to survive a technical review

Your results will be questioned by engineers and lenders. The method is documented, the terminology is standard, and the engine is checked against known answers.

LOLHEUELOLEVSupply availability
Weather that behaves like weather
Weekly-block bootstrapping keeps seasonality and multi-day wind droughts intact.
Realistic outages and maintenance
Two-state Markov outages for gas, binomial counts for multi-unit plants, and explicit hour-based maintenance blocks.
Checked against known answers
Built-in validation compares the engine to exact analytical calculations and the published IEEE RTS-79 benchmark.
Outage data with sources
Outage starting points come from MISO and PJM data, the RTS-GMLC and RTS-96 test systems and NERC GADS class averages, and each entry shows its source. Cost defaults are placeholders: replace them with your own terms.
Traceable outputs
Every report carries an input fingerprint, and a version history lets you diff and restore earlier runs.

Seven analyses, one engine

Every analysis runs on the same simulation, so answers stay consistent when you change an assumption.

Evaluate a portfolioIs this enough?

Enter your thermal units, renewables, grid connection and battery. See availability, loss-of-load hours, expected unserved energy and loss-of-load events against your target.

Find max IT loadHow big can we build?

The tool searches for the largest IT load the portfolio supports at your reliability target, with uncertainty ranges from independent random seeds.

Compare grid scenariosWhat does the grid buy us?

Model the grid as an asset with its own outage statistics. Compare islanded, grid-as-primary and grid-as-backup cases side by side.

Size a least-cost portfolioWhat should we buy?

Dispatch is by energy cost, with true tolling economics: fee, variable O&M and fuel kept separate. Find the cheapest mix that clears the target.

Site feasibilityCan this site serve the tenant?

The largest load the site can serve with generation alone, the grid alone and both, for each grid size you list, as a low, typical and high range. Then every single equipment failure, and pairs of failures, are screened against your target.

Optimize maintenanceWhen should units come down?

Suggests the week each maintenance batch should start for the fewest loss-of-load hours, within the months and crew limits you set. The suggestion is checked against your current schedule on fresh simulated years before you apply it.

Supportable load timelineHow does capacity grow as we build?

Steps through the quarters as resources come online and retire, and solves the supportable IT load in each. See the timeline.

See supportable load, quarter by quarter

  • Every resource has dates. Enter commercial operation as a date or year and quarter, plus a retirement date.
  • Phased builds. Multi-site renewables, unit-by-unit gas additions and a grid connection that grows in dated steps move the curve.
  • Share the answer. Export one-page PDF reports for clients or engineers, a full report with every assumption itemized, a study basis that documents how the result was produced, and an Excel model workbook with live formulas.
0100 200300 400 2027 Q12028 Q12029 Q12030 Q1 MW Supportable load Contracted load ramp Unit 4 online

The limits that bind in practice

A plant that looks firm on nameplate can fall short once its permits, its grid agreement and the weather have their say. Each of these is optional and applied hour by hour.

Air permit limitsRun hours and emissions

Annual caps on operating hours, fuel and NOx and SO₂ tons, for one plant or several. When a cap is used up, a plant stays off or runs only to avoid load loss, and the results show when that happens.

Conditional grid capacityFirm and non-firm import

Split the grid into firm and conditional import that the utility may withdraw during curtailment events, drawn at random or from an hourly series you upload, with the hours and unserved energy during curtailment reported.

TemperatureHot afternoons, cold snaps

Gas turbine output and the datacenter's PUE can follow an hourly temperature series, so heat waves reduce supply and raise load in the same hours. Upload your site's data, or start from built-in hourly temperatures for seven US datacenter regions.

Outage behaviorPeakers and maintenance

Peaking units can use a demand-based repair time, so they fail as often as their outage statistics imply. Maintenance schedules longer than the year are flagged instead of quietly dropped.

Costs a lender will recognize

Reliability and cost come from the same run, so every number traces back to the same simulated years.

Tolling viewWhat the offtaker pays

Capacity fees, variable O&M and fuel kept separate, with cost per MWh delivered and curtailed renewable energy charged as a PPA would charge it.

Owner viewCapital and LCOE

Capital cost, financing and annual recovery for each owned resource, built up to a levelized cost of energy, starting from cited public cost studies that you replace with your own figures.

ContractsGuarantees and coverage

Energy services and power sales agreements: payments, availability guarantees and damages for shortfalls, with a lender view of debt service coverage in an average and a bad year.

Built for teams

Studies live in your organization's workspace, with the reference data your team agrees on.

Accounts and rolesOwners, admins, members, viewers

Invite colleagues or issue access codes. Projects are saved to the server with revision checks, so two people cannot overwrite each other.

Shared librariesOne set of reference data

Outage data, load shapes, PUE shapes and wind and solar profiles shared across the organization, with every version kept.

Scenarios and versionsCompare and restore

Duplicate a scenario, change one assumption and compare them side by side. Ready-made example projects help you start.

Ask about these resultsOptional

Ask questions about a finished run and get answers drawn from that run's own numbers. It is off unless your organization's administrator turns it on.

Questions engineers and lenders ask

What does “nines” mean here?

Supply availability: the share of hours in which the portfolio serves the full facility load. Three nines is 99.9%, about 8.8 hours short in a year. It describes the power supply only. It is not an Uptime Institute Tier rating, which classifies a facility's design.

What are LOLH, EUE and LOLEV?

The standard NERC and IEEE adequacy metrics. LOLH, loss of load hours: expected hours a year with any shortfall. EUE, expected unserved energy: MWh a year not served. LOLEV, loss of load events: separate shortfall events a year. Each is reported with the spread across simulated years.

Why simulate thousands of years instead of adding up capacity?

Shortfalls come from coincidences: a unit trips during maintenance on a still, cloudy week. Nameplate sums and single-year studies miss these. Simulating many years, hour by hour, shows how often they happen and how sure the estimate is.

Does it replace interconnection or power flow studies?

No. Nine Firm is a resource adequacy model: it balances supply and load every hour. Power flow, short circuit, stability and ride-through studies of the network are performed by the transmission provider or your engineers. Nine Firm tells you whether there is enough supply, and in which hours it is tightest.

What do I need to start?

The IT load and PUE, each plant's units and size, hourly wind and solar profiles, the grid import and its outage history, and the battery. Outage data has sourced starting points; cost defaults are placeholders to replace with your own terms.

Where does it run, and who sees my studies?

In the browser, with simulations on our servers. Every request is tied to a signed-in person and their organization, and every database query is limited to that organization, so another organization cannot list, open or run your projects. The security overview is written for IT reviewers and says what has not been done yet.

How do I get access?

Accounts are open by invitation or access code. Contact us for a demo on a site you are weighing.

Contact us for a demo

Leave your email and we will get in touch to walk you through Nine Firm on a site you are weighing. Accounts are open by invitation; if you already have an access code, use Create account at the top of the page.