The Japanese electricity market: a generation prospective

摘要

With the introduction of the power exchange and the opening of the electricity retail, Japanese powergenerators have new options to increase revenues. To be able to take advantage of those possibilitiesfully, generation companies face the challenge to create a special structure inside the organization that,manages the electricity trading, the real time operation and the back office functions.In this paper, the authors refer the Japanese power exchange model and analyze the market rulesadopted by the Japanese electricity industry to individuate the source of profit, the risk hedgingoptions and benefit for the generation companies. The paper also introduces the work flow that thegeneration company operators have to follow daily: the developing of the selling strategy, the tradingtask, the formalization of the power plants dispatch and the submission of the dispatch plan to thetransmission companies.Since the generation company has the duty to supply the electricity sold, it is necessary to control thegeneration assets in the real time to ensure optimal performances and to avoid imbalances between thesubmitted schedule and the metered production.To effciently perform all the necessary tasks (from contract management and selling strategydevelopment to real time operation), the operation has to be supported by an information system. Thisinformation system has to be capable to optimize the generation and contracts portfolio, tocommunicat with transmission providers and market operators, to collect the metered data in the realtime and to dispatch and control each power plant.Due to the changes of market rules and communication protocols, the information system has to beeasy to upgrade and flexible to changes; in addition it has to be strongly reliable since it is controllinglarge size power plants in the real time.The authors propose a computer system framework that allowed the generation company to integratethe necessary functions. The advantages of an integrated system include the reduction of human error,data integrity and improvement of efficiency keeping a high level of flexibility and reliability.The paper concludes with the challenges that the generation companies are still facing and with theprospective in the near future.