Apps Manual

bigUsinas — assets, alarms and metering

The record of every plant, substation and line in the Brazilian grid: live alarms, monthly KPIs, metering validity, forecast and the connection point network.

Getting there: Search by plant, cluster, operator or group on the home page. You can also browse the lists of operators, groups, substations and lines.

Step by step

1. Open your group page to see every asset at once: the mini map shows where the alarms are right now and the chips at the top summarise the last 6 hours.
2. Click an asset to open its record. The selector at the top drives EVERY panel on the page: month, day or custom range.
3. Under ALARMS, chips are always visible — dimmed when there is nothing. Lit means an ongoing event; hover for source and criteria.
4. Under KPIS, check generation, capacity factor, invalid metering, curtailment and availability for the selected period.
5. Under ENERGY — MODEL × MEASUREMENT, the loss ladder breaks down gross energy all the way to the energy settled at the market chamber, flagging the origin of each figure.
6. Scroll to METERING VALIDITY BY HALF-HOUR for the whole month cell by cell, and to POTENTIAL RECOVERY for what can still be recovered.

What to watch

• The SAGER risk chip lights up when metering goes invalid during a restriction — the case where reference generation drops to zero and the curtailment is not accounted for.
• The contestation window is 3 business days. The panel shows the deadline for each month.
• OUTAGES lists what is out at the connecting substation, with validity dates — useful to explain curtailment caused by external network unavailability (REL).
• WORKING WINDOW AT HEIGHT turns forecast wind and gusts into a traffic light, so climbs can be scheduled 72 h ahead.

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bigCurt — grid-wide curtailment and your own report

Live counter of curtailed energy and financial loss, with a technical report per cluster, operator or group.

Getting there: The home page shows the whole country. Use the search box to filter.

Step by step

1. On the home page, read the grid total: curtailed energy, financial loss and the split by source and by curtailment reason.
2. Search for your company or your cluster.
3. On the scope page, use Download PDF for the full technical report and Download CSV for the monthly series.
4. For a cluster, the half-hour series of metering failures is also available in CSV, with the rebuilt estimate and the origin of each value.

What to watch

• REL is external network unavailability, CNF is electrical reliability and ENE is energy surplus — each has different compensation rules.
• Values use the hourly settlement price of the submarket at the time of the event; inflation adjustments are labelled.
• Everything is generated from public data on the fly, and each document carries its snapshot identifier.

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bigSIN — the system map

Generation, lines, substations, headroom and live weather phenomena in a single map.

Getting there: Open the map and search by substation, plant, line or bus.

Step by step

1. Pick a preset at the top of the layer panel (Operation, Watch, Weather, Renewables, Planning, Market) — each turns on the layers for that use.
2. Toggle individual layers in the tree on the left; the counter next to each group shows how many features are live.
3. On the right panel, choose how to colour substations and lines: by voltage, by hub or by headroom.
4. Click a feature to open its details and jump to the full asset record.

What to watch

• Headroom is the spare capacity at the point — the first filter to know whether a new project fits there.
• Phenomena layers (lightning, fire, rain, convection) come from satellite and refresh on their own.
• Line geometry from crowd-sourced mapping is geometry only; electrical attributes always come from official sources, and anything that does not match the official registry is labelled unconfirmed.

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Unified app — map and analytics side by side

For when you want the map and the asset figures on the same screen.

Getting there: Open it and pick the asset on the map or via search.

Step by step

1. Select the asset on the map; the side panel loads the indicators for the chosen period.
2. Change the period at the top to compare months.
3. Follow the full-record link when you need every panel from bigUsinas.

What to watch

• It is the same database as the other apps — a figure that differs between screens means a different period or scope, not a different source.

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bigBESS — storage

Where a battery makes sense: capacity, potential revenue and auction context.

Getting there: Open the hub and browse the project and market panels.

Step by step

1. Start with the overview to understand the current capacity auction design.
2. Use the project panels to compare power, duration and connection point.
3. Cross-check with bigSIN headroom before settling on a point.

What to watch

• Auction prices and rules change by regulation — the app shows the date of the source for each figure.

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bigAlertas — lightning and severe weather on Telegram

Lightning and severe weather warnings near your assets, straight to your phone.

Getting there: Through the bigAlertas page or the Telegram bot.

Step by step

1. Open the bot and register the assets you want to monitor.
2. Set the alert radius in kilometres.
3. Get a warning whenever there is a strike inside the radius, with distance and time.

What to watch

• The source is a geostationary satellite; no lightning on the map means the satellite detected none at that moment, not that the site is safe.
• The warning is meant to drive stop-work decisions at height and post-event inspection.

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Validity colours, half-hour by half-hour

• Green: valid metering. The value reached the ONS and the period is computed from the measurement.
• Red: invalid metering with no estimated generation. Reference generation drops to zero and the curtailment of that half-hour is not accounted for.
• Blue: invalid metering but with generation estimated by the ONS — substitution done. That half-hour IS accounted for; this is the outcome you want.
• Grey: period not ingested.
• The cell outline shows the curtailment reason (REL, CNF or ENE). A red cell with an outline is curtailment left out of the books; a blue one is curtailment counted.
• The invalid flag is about telemetry, not the sensor: it means the transmission failed for more than six minutes within the half-hour. In most cases the measurement does exist in the plant's own recorder.

Rebuilding the series with sister plants

• When metering does not arrive, the ONS accepts a reconstruction based on series from plants in the same cluster — the sisters.
• The panel ranks sisters by period coverage and recoverable MWh, with historical correlation and distance, and rates how defensible each choice is.
• Order of preference: the plant's own record, then the best sister, then the meteorological floor. The rule asks for the plant's own data first.
• Download the combined series ready to submit, or the blank template if you prefer to fill it with your own record — then send your CSV back for checking.
• The ordinary contestation window is 3 business days. Outside it, a period only becomes claimable again if a retroactive window is opened by regulation.
• The app tracks, on its own, the revisions the ONS makes after submission — restored reference generation shows up in the panel, with a date.

Short glossary

• Curtailment (constrained-off): energy the plant could have generated but did not, due to a restriction order. Computed as reference minus verified generation, when positive.
• Reference generation: how much the plant would have generated in the ONS calculation. This is what drops to zero when metering fails.
• REL: external network unavailability. CNF: electrical reliability requirement. ENE: energy surplus.
• Franchise: hours of unavailability that generate no compensation under the ordinary regime, accumulated from the start of the calendar year — not monthly.
• PLD and CMO: settlement price and marginal operating cost. The gap between them in the same interval is network congestion.
• Capacity factor: generation in the period divided by what the installed capacity would produce over that same period.