Constructing Offering Curves for a CSP Producer in Day-ahead Electricity Markets

In many countries, the installation and operation of concentrated solar power plants has been promoted with high feed-in tariffs and other incentives. However, as this technology is becoming more mature and the installation costs are being reduced, the incentives are minimized or totally abolished. Under these new economic conditions, there is an increased need for operation planning and power trading tools that will help the operators of such systems to make optimal decisions under the various uncertainties they face. This paper provides a model that can be used to derive the offering curves of a CSP producer in the day-ahead (spot) market. The model can also be used for the hourly short-term operation planning of the system. In order to tackle with the uncertainties of electricity prices and solar irradiance, the stochastic programming framework is used and a risk measure is incorporated into the model. A case study is conducted to show the applicability of the model.QC 20161220