Coal Asset Valuation Tool (CAVT)
Bruce Biewald presented on Synapse’s Coal Asset Valuation Tool (CAVT) at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis' Coal Finance 2014 Conference on March 19, 2014. CAVT is a spreadsheet-based database and model that determines the future economic viability of coal units. CAVT forecasts the costs for individual coal units to comply with environmental regulations and compares these costs to electricity market prices. It aggregates publicly available data (such as capacity, generated power, and heat rate) on non-cogenerating coal units and combines this with publicly available cost methodologies to calculate the cost of complying with environmental regulations. The calculated future cost of each coal unit is compared to the estimated future cost of wholesale market purchases to determine future economic viability on a unit-by-unit basis.