Impact of planning uncertainties in power plant operation planning

Due to the implementation of new markets, i.e. intraday markets as well as the markets for reserve, a higher number of planning uncertainties has to be considered within the operation planning of power plants. Besides outages of thermal power plants and prices at day-ahead wholesale markets, the prices at the intraday market and the market for minute reserve as well as the requested amount of reserve energy by the transmission system operator are not known at the point of time when the operation planning is carried out. Thus, prognoses for these values have to be made. For a better integration of the stochastic characteristics of these values into the planning process, different possible realizations of the uncertain input data in form of scenarios should be modeled instead of a single consideration of estimated values. Within this paper, a stochastic optimization method is described, which adequately integrates the stochastic characteristics of the relevant input parameters into the operation planning process, resulting in distribution functions of typical output values like the contribution margin.