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Power Plant Outage & Maintenance Optimization Solution
- Intraday and day-ahead 5-60 mins planned outages schedules for a portfolio of plants
- Quantify the effect of planned outages on the offer stack and spot market price
- Minimize the cost of energy procurement to fulfill the existing contractual obligations
- Maximizing the profit for the remaining operating capacity
- Seamless integration of QR AI Forecaster for load and price forecasting

Power Plant Outage & Maintenance Optimization Solution
- Intraday and day-ahead 5-60 mins planned outages schedules for a portfolio of plants
- Quantify the effect of planned outages on the offer stack and spot market price
- Minimize the cost of energy procurement to fulfill the existing contractual obligations
- Maximizing the profit for the remaining operating capacity
- Seamless integration of QR AI Forecaster for load and price forecasting
Power plant portfolio outage & maintenance simulation and identification of optimal schedules minimizing adverse impacts on market prices and profit
Challenges
Clients’ profile. Traders, and portfolio & asset managers of generation companies with a diverse fleet of the merchant or load serving assets, with increasing numbers of aging and renewables plants, within ISO or bilateral spot markets.
Target. Simulate and optimize the timing and duration of planned shutdown for one or more plants in real-time intraday, day-ahead and mid-term (5-60 mins) markets. Quantify the effect of such outages on the offer stack and spot market price, and the corresponding cost of fulfilling existing contractual obligations, while maximizing the profit for the remaining operating capacity.
A fully-featured, ready-for-use, standalone cloud solution that can be easily integrated with in-house trading and ETRM systems, and ISOs via flexible APIs.
Why QR Outage Optimizer Solution
This is an add-on to QR Bidding Optimizer with the same dashboard and interface, and an additional interface where you can define a shutdown simulation scenario, by listing the plants and their capacity and start and end date for simulation. For additional information please see QR Bidding Optimizer.
The solution simulates a shutdown scenario with the objective to maximize the gross margin of the remaining non-outage capacity, while taking into account the resulting change in the spot price and the cost of energy purchase from the spot market to fulfill all outstanding bilateral commitments.
First, the solution estimates the stack of the bids and offers for the periods where a shutdown is to be simulated by excluding the bids corresponding to the shutdown capacity. Next, it optimizes (using QR Bidding Optimization Solution) the bids of the remaining capacity and other plants, and deduces their expected RTDs and the resulting spot price that maximize the total gross margin of the entire portfolio of plants.
You can simultaneously run multiple shutdown scenarios in the background, compare the results and opt for the better scenario. These outputs are computed at the granularity of the market, 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes. Execution can be every 15 to 60 minutes, 24/7.
How it works. The system automatically fetches around the clock all necessary data from ISO plants and the demand side. Then QR AI Forecaster computes also around the clock, accurate AI forecasts of system price, demand and the stack of bids & offers. Next, you define outage scenarios (quantities and timing) on the interface of the Bidding Optimizer. Finally, you manually execute QR Optimizer. The Optimizer computes the optimal bids for each trading period whose expected cleared RTD maximize the P&L for capacity not in outage while meeting all demand obligations.