Optimal involvement in futures markets of a power producer

This paper addresses the optimal involvement in a futures electricity market of a power producer to hedge against the risk of pool price volatility. The considered trading horizon spans one whole year. Recognizing the highly uncertain nature of future pool prices, a stochastic programming framework with recourse is used to model this decision-making problem. The resulting problem is a large scale mixed-integer linear programming problem. Scenario reduction techniques are used to make this problem tractable. Risk is properly modeled using the CVaR methodology. Results from a realistic case study are provided and analyzed. Some conclusions are finally drawn.