Electricity Pool Trading and Portfolio Modeling

Successful trading and bidding into a competitive electricity pool require the ability to respond quickly to the changing market conditions.

iPool provides the features required to enable quick and appropriate market responses:

• Volume position and exposure
• Financial position and exposure
• Short term and intra-day forecasting
• Competitor Bid Offer Analysis
• Fast historical Market Analysis
• Interactive what If Market Scenarios

Energy companies and trading firms will benefit from iPool’s multi-portfolio modeling with its ability to aggregate results and evaluate against historical and simulated market scenarios. IPool models:

• Customer Demand Portfolio
• Generation Demand Portfolio
• Wholesale Contracts (ISDA and Power Supply Agreements)
• Retail Contracts and Tariffs (Single rate and multi-rate Time-Of-Use).

IPool’s object oriented technology enables flexible and detailed modeling of different kinds of power stations, their operating characteristics their associated costs and their supply availability.

• Models Coal Fired plants, Gas Turbines, Combine Cycle GTs, Hydros, Pump Storage, Solar, Wind, Biomass and generic stations.
• Models production costs using multi-point incremental cost curves, O&M costs, capital charges, network charges, start up costs, carbon costs
• Models and tracks energy storage levels, energy limitations and cascaded stations.
• Captures historical behavior and use them in simulation

iPool models the static and dynamic system constraints, the bid offer prices and the reserve offer prices are co-optimized in the pricing and dispatch of generation. 

• Models different dispatch and trading intervals
  • 5 minute dispatch and trading
  • 3o minute dispatch and trading
  • Hourly dispatch and trading
• Can use actual and aggregated bid offers
• Models transmission interconnectors
• Models generic dynamic constraints
• Models ramp rates 
• Models static and dynamic loss factors
• Models limits on energy storage
• Models both supply offers and demand bids
• Models market specific pricing rules

The key to accurate forecasting is the model’s ability to accurately model reality. Validating the accuracy of the model is the first step in forecasting. iPool’s iView facility shows comparison of actual vs. simulated prices for checking model validity. iPool has the following relevant features for market analysis and forecasting:

• Use actual market provided bid-offer data files with minimal to no manual processing required.
• iPool’s Bid Aggregator creates typical bid offers for different calendar days from historical bid offers.  
• iPool can auto-detect new incoming units and can extract relevant forecast parameters from historical scenarios that are user modifiable for forecasting future scenarios.

Generator bid offers change from day to day and it can be dependent on the participant’s contract portfolio, the system demand, the system constraints and other market conditions.  Using the actual historical bid offers may not be applicable for forecasting future scenarios.  iPool captures the typical bids of all participants for different calendar days and with its iBid module can model the dynamic responses and adjust them to the prevailing market conditions during simulation.