Information requirements for strategic decision making: energy market

Over the last two decades, the electricity sector has been involved in a challenging restructuring process in which the vertical integrated structure (monopoly) is being replaced by a horizontal set of companies. The growing supply of electricity, flowing in response to free market pricing at the wellhead, led to increased competition. In the new framework of deregulation, what characterizes the electric industry is a commodity wholesale electricity marketplace. This new environment has drastically changed the objective of electricity producing companies. In the vertical integrated industry, utilities were forced to meet all the demand from customers living in a certain region at fixed rates. Then, the operation of the Generation Companies (GENCOs) was centralized and a single decision maker allocated the energy services by minimizing total production costs. Nowadays, GENCOs are involved not only in the electricity market but also in additional markets such as fuel markets or environmental markets. A gas or coal producer may have fuel contracts that define the production limit over a time horizon. Therefore, producers must observe this price levels in these other markets. This is a lesson we learned from the Electricity Crisis in California. The Californian market\u27s collapse was not the result of market decentralization but it was triggered by other decisions, such as high natural gas prices, with a direct impact in the supply-demand chain. This dissertation supports generation asset business decisions -from fuel supply concerns to wholesale trading in energy and ancillary services. The forces influencing the value chain are changing rapidly, and can become highly controversial. Through this report, the author brings an integrated and objective perspective, providing a forum to identify and address common planning and operational needs. The purpose of this dissertation is to present theories and ideas that can be applied directly in algorithms to make GENCOs decisions more efficient. This will decompose the problem into independent subproblems for each time interval. This is preferred because building a complete model in one time is practically impossible. The diverse scope of this report is unified by the importance of each topic to understanding or enhancing the profitability of generation assets. Studies of top strategic issues will assess directly the promise and limits to profitability of energy trading. Studies of ancillary services will permit companies to realistically gauge the profitability of different services, and develop bidding strategies tuned to competitive markets

Forecasting the Short-term Value of Wind Power for Risk-aware Bidding Strategies in Single-imbalance Price Electricity Markets

The participation of wind energy in electricity markets and strategic bidding in the day-ahead market has been investigated with growing interest in recent years. However, markets adopting a single-price imbalance settlement where participants can increase their profits if they help to put the system back into balance have received very limited attention in the academic literature. In this thesis, new probabilistic models forecasting the short-term value of wind power are developed and their use in bidding in these types of markets is investigated. The proposed strategies are designed for participants who want to bid strategically in the day-ahead market to increase the value of the energy generated at a wind farm, where value is measured in terms of revenue and exposure to risk. Following an extensive analysis of the available market data, two alternative approaches are developed to generate day-ahead forecasts of the market quantities of relevance for the work. These forecasts are then combined with short-term predictions of wind power in a probabilistic framework. Bids are formulated to reflect the participant\u27s risk profile, conditioned upon the uncertainty in future wind power generation and electricity market conditions. The methodology is applied to a case study where the participation of a real wind farm in the new Irish electricity market is simulated over a test period. The benefits of the proposed models are clearly demonstrated as the strategies successfully improve the value of wind power for the participant by increasing their revenue while reducing the exposure to risk. Moreover, the market quantity forecasts developed in this work prove to be more valuable than a wind power forecast of higher accuracy for a risk-seeking participant

Hierarchical congestion management for a deregulated power industry

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-216).by Chien-Ning Yu.Ph.D

Forecasting: theory and practice

Forecasting has always been in the forefront of decision making and planning. The uncertainty that surrounds the future is both exciting and challenging, with individuals and organisations seeking to minimise risks and maximise utilities. The lack of a free-lunch theorem implies the need for a diverse set of forecasting methods to tackle an array of applications. This unique article provides a non-systematic review of the theory and the practice of forecasting. We offer a wide range of theoretical, state-of-the-art models, methods, principles, and approaches to prepare, produce, organise, and evaluate forecasts. We then demonstrate how such theoretical concepts are applied in a variety of real-life contexts, including operations, economics, finance, energy, environment, and social good. We do not claim that this review is an exhaustive list of methods and applications. The list was compiled based on the expertise and interests of the authors. However, we wish that our encyclopedic presentation will offer a point of reference for the rich work that has been undertaken over the last decades, with some key insights for the future of the forecasting theory and practice

The use of computational intelligence techniques for mid-term electricity price forecasting

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementWe currently live in a world ruled by large amounts of data. Organizations’ success is highly determined by the way they foresee and assess changes occurring in the future. Predictive data analytics is the art of building and using models that create forecasts based on patterns extracted from historical data. So, it is a process of making projections about a specific event which the outcome is still unknown in the present. One of the main applications is price prediction (Kelleher, Namee, & D’Arcy, 2015). Price prediction can be applied in innumerous types of business, including the energy sector. Additionally, Big Data has created opportunities for development of new energy services and bears a promise of better energy management and conservation (Grolinger, L’Heureux, Capretz, & Seewald, 2016). Whenever prediction deals with time-series data, it can be designated as forecasting. The electricity spot prices (ESP) represent the result of the market bidding prices outcome, in the electric wholesale market. Predicting these prices is an important and impactful task for market participants, like producers, consumers and retailers, since the principal objective for such players is to achieve the lowest cost in comparison with competitors. ESP play a huge role in energy market’s decision making. It is important both for developing proper bidding strategies as well as for making conscient and sustainable investment decisions (Keynia & Heydari, 2019). Additionally, it impacts the decision of the technologies to use, for example, choosing between renewable energy generators or classic gas turbines. Furthermore, the topic of electricity prices forecasting is extremely relevant for both developed and developing countries. Developed countries search for their economic prospect’s improvement. Electric energy efficiency is a crucial metric for that improvement. Electric energy efficiency can decrease the electricity prices thanks to the reduction of consumption, thus decreasing the need of having new expensive power generation and diminishing the pressure on energy resources. Therefore, ESP behavior is an important factor in their economy. Regarding developing economies, which have faced problems to take the populations out of poverty, the electricity sector restructuring has been fundamental for helping increase the levels of economic development (Ebrahimian, Barmayoon, Mohammadi, & Ghadimi, 2018)

Hierarchical reinforcement learning for trading agents

Autonomous software agents, the use of which has increased due to the recent growth in computer power, have considerably improved electronic commerce processes by facilitating automated trading actions between the market participants (sellers, brokers and buyers). The rapidly changing market environments pose challenges to the performance of such agents, which are generally developed for specific market settings. To this end, this thesis is concerned with designing agents that can gradually adapt to variable, dynamic and uncertain markets and that are able to reuse the acquired trading skills in new markets. This thesis proposes the use of reinforcement learning techniques to develop adaptive trading agents and puts forward a novel software architecture based on the semi-Markov decision process and on an innovative knowledge transfer framework. To evaluate my approach, the developed trading agents are tested in internationally well-known market simulations and their behaviours when buying or/and selling in the retail and wholesale markets are analysed. The proposed approach has been shown to improve the adaptation of the trading agent in a specific market as well as to enable the portability of the its knowledge in new markets

Forecasting: theory and practice

Forecasting has always been at the forefront of decision making and planning. The uncertainty that surrounds the future is both exciting and challenging, with individuals and organisations seeking to minimise risks and maximise utilities. The large number of forecasting applications calls for a diverse set of forecasting methods to tackle real-life challenges. This article provides a non-systematic review of the theory and the practice of forecasting. We provide an overview of a wide range of theoretical, state-of-the-art models, methods, principles, and approaches to prepare, produce, organise, and evaluate forecasts. We then demonstrate how such theoretical concepts are applied in a variety of real-life contexts. We do not claim that this review is an exhaustive list of methods and applications. However, we wish that our encyclopedic presentation will offer a point of reference for the rich work that has been undertaken over the last decades, with some key insights for the future of forecasting theory and practice. Given its encyclopedic nature, the intended mode of reading is non-linear. We offer cross-references to allow the readers to navigate through the various topics. We complement the theoretical concepts and applications covered by large lists of free or open-source software implementations and publicly-available databases.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Forecasting: theory and practice

Forecasting has always been at the forefront of decision making and planning. The uncertainty that surrounds the future is both exciting and challenging, with individuals and organisations seeking to minimise risks and maximise utilities. The large number of forecasting applications calls for a diverse set of forecasting methods to tackle real-life challenges. This article provides a non-systematic review of the theory and the practice of forecasting. We provide an overview of a wide range of theoretical, state-of-the-art models, methods, principles, and approaches to prepare, produce, organise, and evaluate forecasts. We then demonstrate how such theoretical concepts are applied in a variety of real-life contexts. We do not claim that this review is an exhaustive list of methods and applications. However, we wish that our encyclopedic presentation will offer a point of reference for the rich work that has been undertaken over the last decades, with some key insights for the future of forecasting theory and practice. Given its encyclopedic nature, the intended mode of reading is non-linear. We offer cross-references to allow the readers to navigate through the various topics. We complement the theoretical concepts and applications covered by large lists of free or open-source software implementations and publicly-available databases