OVERVIEW
Energy costs are becoming an increasingly significant factor in the total production cost of many manufacturing companies. Whether you are a large power producer or a large consumer, you need to buy or sell electricity at the most attractive competitive price.
The difficulty arises from power price volatility over time and changes hourly during the day, based on global power exchange. The challenge is two-fold: how can you improve the planning of your power production to benefit as much as possible from the high price at a certain hour. Also, how can you avoid balancing penalties from the distributor if you do not produce or consume what you informed them you would.
ENERTOP, a solution based on the most recent technologies in Operations Research, answers these two questions. A first predictive model looks at historical data and other exogenous parameters having an influence on the hourly price of electricity, and then establishes the optimal trading plan. In order to do so, ENERTOP contains a mathematical model representing your complete power production plant. It considers the yields of the boilers and turbo-alternators, the heating value of the different fuels you might be using, their availability and other technical parameters making it possible to plan power production based on the input values of the model.
In the steel industry, producing electricity from excess gas discharged from the coke plant and the blast furnace or even from naphthalene fuel – another co-product of steel production – is necessary to improve profitability.
In some cases, it is possible to have a small gas storage capacity that makes it possible to move the electricity production peaks in order to correspond to the maximum electricity price peak and this, of course, maximizes trading profits. Depending on the time of the day, it may even be more advantageous to buy more electricity from the network at certain times, and sell the excess electricity to the network when it becomes more expensive. ENERTOP forecasting models will make it possible to calculate the best combination.
Once the electricity plan is calculated and optimized by the ENERTOP planning models, you must send it to the power network provider on day - 1 and comply with it. As the global power balance depends on the right forecast of electricity usage at a certain point in time, company electricity planning must be as accurate as possible. In order to motivate companies to be as close to the forecast as possible, the power distributor will apply penalties when the company produces less or even more than predicted in their planning. That is why ENERTOP also provides a quarter of an hour model that makes it possible to adapt its own electricity production or consumption on-line.
Every second, this on-line model calculates the power exchange for the next quarter of an hour. If ENERTOP detects a deviation of the electricity production, it informs the manager who can make adjustments to his installation to comply with the forecast, based on ENERTOP recommendations.
BENEFITS
- Increase the knowledge of costs and potential revenues
- Improve the power installation efficiency
- Optimize your energy trading profits
- Reduce balancing penalties by on-line model recommendations
- Create the most economical but realistic trading plan
PRODUCT SHEETS & CASE STUDIES
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FAQ
What sort of company would be interested in ENERTOP?
Any company with a power exchange of a minimum of 50 GWh/ year or a company with balancing penalties as a result of inaccurate forecasts.
When is it advantageous to trade its production on the power exchange?
Any Company with a minimum capacity of 2MW would benefit from trading its power on the power exchange market.