Maintaining New Zealand's electrical reserve management tool

Managing the electrical reserves in a small, geographically elongated nation like New Zealand is a challenge. The Reserve Management Tool (RMT) developed over a decade ago optimally schedules the reserve load given the current and anticipated circumstances every half hour to ensure that the reserve requirement for electricity is always met. However with changes in the underlying computing platform, and the recognition that the tool needed to be more flexible to incorporate future generator development meant that this tool needed a revamp. This paper describes the present tool, the motivation for the redesign and demonstrates the new capabilities.