Short-term energy trading considering long-term contract constraints

Based on long-term contracts, short-term energy trading on the day-ahead spot energy market is a valuable instrument for utilities, independent power producers and energy brokers to economically optimize their contract portfolio and to realize additional profits. Nevertheless, long-term contracts may include conditions like, for example, take-or-pay-obligations or energy-dependent price structures. To determine the optimal short-term schedule, these long-term conditions must also be taken into account leading to the short- and long-term coordination problem. This paper presents a new approach to this problem introducing the so-called implicitly coordinating optimal scheduling (ICOS) method that solves the short-term scheduling problem with respect to long-term contract constraints without the need to apply external coordination procedures