Building IT infrastructure to bid generation in ERCOT

Summary form only given, as follows. In the past, a generating utility had time to study the generation scheduling and pricing problem at a comparative leisurely pace. To meet the daily bidding deadline in ERCOT, TXU (USA) built a sophisticated IT infrastructure to automatically gather data (load forecasts, fuel costs, heat rates, etc.) for generation scheduling, bidding, and settlement. This paper describes the IT infrastructure that they built to bid generation in ERCOT and share their deployment experience.