The value of flexibility in power markets

Le 08 mars 2017

Auteurs

Stéphane Goutte, Philippe Vassilopoulos

Astract

In this paper we attempt to quantify the net revenues that can be captured by a flexible resource able to react to the short term price variations on the day-ahead and intraday markets in Germany. We find that the difference between day-ahead and intraday revenues for a flexible resource has been increasing (although the profitability has been decreasing on both markets). This difference is more pronounced once 15mn price variations can be captured by a flexible resource. The net revenues from the local 15mn auction (which is held 3 hours after the hourly ”coupled” day-ahead auction) are more than eight times higher than the day-ahead hourly auction but below the net revenues that can be captured with the high prices from the continuous market. The results of the backward-looking empirical estimations allow us to distinguish and quantify two components of flexibility: (1) the ”immediacy” value as we are approaching real-time and the urgency of the delivery increases (this value is revealed during the continuous intraday process and is highly linked to the stochastic nature of power supply and demand (i.e. wind/solar forecasts, forced outages of thermal generation,…) forecast error risk), and (2) the ”flexibility” component as a resource can react to variations of shorter granularity (15mn Vs 60mn). We model and quantify the ”flexibility” component.