Intra-Day & Balancing Markets¶
Convergence towards real-time operations relies on
- BRP
- Adjustment Market: Intra-day market mechanism
- Balancing Market: (near) realtime market
If a deviation from the original schedule occurs (for producer/consumer)
- Re-dispatch of own units: Compensate with other generation/consumption means within their own portfolio
- Intra-day/adjustment market: Find ways to adjust through agreements with other players between day-ahed market clearing and actual operation
- Balancing market: Let system operator put system back to balance
Day-Ahead Market¶
Day-Ahead market is a financial market with
- Pool based on auction mechanism
- Only transactions
- No generation/consumption
- Market participants and system operator are informed about market clearing outcomes (price & volumes for each market time unit)
- In European set-up, the market participants will then self-dispatch, ie determine themselves how they will generate/consume depend on volumes & prices
- Fairly long time before actual operation [12, 36] hours
BRP¶
Balance Responsible Parties
Companies that can and may handle the balance responsibility for production and consumption units and/or trades actual electricity.
Intra-Day Market¶
Intra-Day Market is based on bilateral contracts, even though handled through central platform
Purpose: Need for corrective actions may highly vary depending upon how new information disclosure occurs between day-ahead market clearing and actual operation
Features
- Fewer players
- Lesser liquidity
- Low trade volume
Organization: leaning towards electronic reading
Flexibility summarizes the impact of operational constraints (ie, minimum up and downtime, ramping, minimum operating point, etc)
You need not only buy alone or sell alone; you can do both to exploit any market inefficiencies
It may be difficult to foresee the actual imbalance that would need to be fixed eventually
Decision-making in such adjustment markets can be complex & stressful
Balancing Market¶
- Regulation market: Participants that offer to buy/sell, prior to hour of operations
- Balancing market: Participants cover the cost of their contribution to place the system off-balance
Cases¶
- Positive: Supply > Demand: downward regulation required
- Negative: Supply < Demand: upward regulation required
- Balanced: Supply \(\approx\) Demand: no regulation required
Payment Settlement¶
- One-price: Total payment/revenue of day-ahead market participants for deviations from schedule equals revenue/payment of balancing generators
- If one’s own deviation leads to off-balancing system, it leads to a loss
- If one’s own deviation helps in balancing system, it leads to a profit
- Two-price
- Those off-balancing system penalized
- Those supporting system (unintentionally) will not get extra rewards
Causes of Imbalance¶
- Electric load is greater/less than forecasted at the time of market-clearing
- Renewable energy generation is greater/less than forecasted at the time of market-clearing
- Outages/operational difficulties of production units
- Outages/operational difficulties of transmission equipments
- Internal congestion (within market/balancing zone)