Modeling power price uncertainty for midterm generation planning

Decision making of power generation and trading are guided by power prices, characterized by a volatility unprecedented in any other commodity market. This means a significant increase of planning risk for electric utilities and therefore a decrease of the probability to gain actually the expected profit margin. Because of the uncertain environment, tools for decision support have newly been developed. In this paper the stochastic characteristics of power prices are discussed and an approach is presented to model uncertainties for stochastic optimization tools using the scenario analysis. A first exemplary investigation shows the necessity to take correlations between uncertainties into account. The target of the ongoing research project is to investigate the necessary modeling accuracy for all planning uncertainties with regard to the optimization results.