Hydro power plant revenue opportunities

Partners: Swiss Economics, ETHZ (FEN)
Duration: 04/2023 - 11/2023
Funding: SFOE
Project Leader: Swiss Economics
Project Team: Dr. Alexander Fuchs, Dr. Jared Garrison, Dr. Adamantios Marinakis, Dr. Turhan Demiray

Categorisation and review of markets and power plant types for the revenue matrix.
Detailed revenue calculation for day-ahead and futures market.
Development of simple heuristics for revenue estimation. Calibration, estimation of accuracy, implementation in spreadsheet form.
Synthesis, consideration of marketing costs.
Treatment of power plant expansions, power plant complexes and estimation for the use of real deployment schedules.

Operators of large hydropower plants receive a market premium for the electricity they sell. The market premium is intended to compensate for uncovered production costs.
If the revenues are below the remuneration rate, the power plant operator receives the difference; if they are above it, the operator must pay the difference back to the grid surcharge fund.
The SFOE intends to update the revenue estimate used for this purpose.
All revenue options are to be taken into account.

Revenues are dominated by day-ahead and futures market.
Calibration for historical price time series and variation of power plant parameters.
Heuristics for storage and pumping operation give good results for individual power plants.
Remaining uncertainty for power plant complexes.