Power Sourcing Portfolio Trading Optimization

Unrivaled Electricity Sourcing Portfolio Optimization solution for Utilities, Retail Energy Service Providers and LSEs, Boasting Significant Energy Procurement Costs Savings

Minimizing Energy Costs Challenges for LSEs and Energy Retail Providers

Clients’ profile. Traders, portfolio, and asset managers of any load-serving entity—utilities, electric cooperatives, munis, and energy retail marketers—with a diverse power sourcing portfolio composed of bilateral physical PPA and callable contracts, together with the possibility of buying (respectively selling) the shortfall (respectively excess) capacity in real-time intraday and day-ahead bilateral (5 – 60 minutes) spot electricity markets.

Targets:

Minimize total energy sourcing cost by dynamically adjusting for every 5–60 minute trading period, buying from the bilateral contracts, along with the corresponding buy-sell in the spot market, while meeting demand, contractual, and regulatory constraints.
Implement real-time 24/7 automated trading in a web platform to enable multiple traders to log in and manage demand, energy sourcing, and all contractual constraints; and the electronic submission of dispatch and buy-sale orders to each bilateral supplier and scheduling to ISOs.
A full-featured, ready-for-use, standalone cloud solution that can be easily integrated with in-house ETRMs via flexible APIs.
Minimize energy procurement cost. Bilateral contract nomination or scheduling solely driven by cost considerations, as in-unit commitment, misses out on opportunities created in the spot markets. The challenge is to implement dynamic trading strategies that can take full advantage of arbitrage opportunities arising from price movements in volatile spot markets by adjusting the nomination of each bilateral procurement contract up or down and compensating with buy-sell from the spot market to minimize total energy sourcing cost.

QR Energy Sourcing Optimizer Solution

QR AI Forecaster is seamlessly integrated to provide forecasts of system demand, spot price and the offer stack for each forward trading period. Read more
QR Data Hub is especially designed to streamline and automate the data pipeline across power trading operations. Read more
QR Energy Sourcing. For a procurement portfolio of supply contracts (PPA, bilateral contracted capacity and callable contracts) and spot buy-sell, the solution computes optimal 5-60 minute dispatch nominations to each bilateral supplier, taking all constraints into account, and the resulting buy-sell in the spot market, across every forward (5-60 minute) trading period, intraday and day-ahead. These outputs are computed at the granularity of the market: 5, 15, 30, or 60 minutes.
Execution frequency of this automated trading bot can be every 15 to 60 minutes, 24/7, with a runtime of just a few minutes each round.
The objective of this optimization model is to minimize total energy procurement costs. This is achieved in two ways:
- Trimming downside losses. When forecasted spot prices are lower than the cost of some bilateral procurement contracts, optimization reduces scheduling from these bilateral contracts, subject to contractual constraints, and increases buying from the spot markets to satisfy total load requirements.
- Capturing upside gains. When forecasted spot prices are higher than the cost of some bilateral procurements, optimization increases buying from these bilaterals to the maximum allowed under contractual terms, to satisfy load requirements first, then sells the excess imbalance to the spot market for profit.
How it works. The system fetches around the clock all necessary data, including the cost of each bilateral contract building the supply side, the consumption meter quantities of the demand side, SCADA, weather etc. Then within minutes, QR AI Forecaster computes accurate price and demand forecasts for every dispatch period. Then the optimizer uses these forecasts to compute the optimal dispatch nomination across the bilateral contracts subject to all constraints, to meet demand at the lowest cost, and deduces the corresponding buy-sell in the spot market. The cycle is automated and runs every 10-15 minutes to produce new dispatch signals, 24/7.

QR AI Price Forecasting Dashboard

QR Data Hub

QR Energy Sourcing Portfolio & Trading Optimization Dashboard

QR Sourcing Portfolio Trading Advanced Ecosystem

Microservice architecture enables accelerated custom configuration of energy portfolio trading and dispatch optimization solutions.
API-friendly ecosystem allows flexible integration and data exchange with third party & in-house systems. Functionalities are constantly enhanced and extended to meet clients requirements.

Energy Sourcing Portfolio Trading Optimization Benefits

You can always start with a POC trial where we back-test some of your trades against the optimal scenarios, and deduce how much QR Trading Optimizer can improve your P&L.
License what you need. You can license each component separately, depending on your needs, e.g., price forecasting, bidding & trading optimization, back-office settlement & billing, or risk management.
Two flexible delivery options:
- Trading Optimization as a Service. Our cloud platform and expert team do everything, and you receive, via API and in web dashboards, the desired outputs, e.g., price forecasts, optimal bidding & trading schedules every 10 minutes, 24/7. No software installation, hardware, or IT resources are needed.
- Software as a Service (SaaS) where we implement the system on a private cloud of your choosing, or on-site, and you control the data and the models.
Ready-to-use platform. We offer a large number of specially designed algorithms and models for bidding gas, coal and diesel power plants. These can be used on your assets and markets with minor configuration.
Cost-effective pricing. Whether you use QR Trading Optimizer as a service or as SaaS, you pay one single annual subscription fee. The fee comprises the license, maintenance, and upgrade releases. In no case will this solution cost anything; it can generate profits worth 10x its license cost.
P&L enhancement. QR Trading Optimizer considerably improves the trading P&L, or asset valuation.
- Maximize profit from bidding, generation, and selling in a power market or ISO. Maximize profit from bidding into reserve markets versus selling in the spot market.
- Minimize plant wear and tear.
Expert team. In-house trading optimization models require extensive expert resources. Models are sensitive to a myriad of constraints in assets & operations. QR Trading Optimizer was created as a universal optimization platform that could be configured for various operations. Our team of mathematician PhD experts works closely with clients to customize and maintain the optimization model that suits their asset portfolio.