Control Center and Energy Management Solutions
General Information
- Description
The forces driving energy market liberalization and privatization are changing the world of energy supply. Consequently, the business focus of the energy supply has shifted from supply reliability and cost minimization to competitiveness and optimization of earnings, which have become today's dominant factors and will remain so well in the future.
Today, energy supply companies are facing major challenges including competition, customer retention and satisfaction, and shareholder value. They must react quickly and flexibly to new requirements and changing market conditions. But they can only meet these challenges by reengineering and optimizing their existing business processes.
Siemens is the leading supplier for energy management and automation solutions in regulated and deregulated markets for:
- Single energy suppliers
- Multiple energy suppliers
- Municipalities
- Generation companies, transmission providers, system operators, and distribution providers in deregulated energy markets
- New participants in the business such as energy traders, balance managers, risk assessors and energy suppliers
- Operators of traction power systems for railways
- Industrial power consumers
Our understanding of your business processes - based on the experience gained from an installed base of more than 1800 control systems - enables us to ensure and consolidate your success. Meeting your needs is our business; we offer a comprehensive range of innovative, integrated and modular solutions, advanced technology, fast delivery and open systems. Our spectrum of solutions encompasses a wide spectrum of needs.
Our Portfolio (12)
Market Operations
- Description
- Benefits
- The Market Clearing Engine
- The Market Participant Interface
Balancing the Interest of the Public and Market Participants
Operating an energy market requires balancing the complex interests of the public, market participants and the market operator.
Siemens helps market operators meet this challenge through its Spectrum PowerCC Energy Market Management (EMM) system that incorporates the latest market clearing technology in a set of modular, high performance components and engines.
Public interests include reliability of the electric energy supply and the macro-economic interest for the lowest market-clearing price for electric energy.
Market participants need to optimize investments, increase operational efficiency and have timely access to highly accurate information.
Market operators need to be highly efficient in running complex operations, flexible in adjusting market rules and proficient in coordinating grid security while providing highly available market operations.
Spectrum PowerCC EMM meets these needs and more with a highly modular solution that lowers market prices , optimizes business processes and increases grid reliability for LMP-based centralized markets . The components of the Spectrum PowerCC EMM are best deployed as an integrated solution; however, each can be individually applied to an existing market management system to preserve investments already made into legacy systems. Alternatively, market operators can get the benefits of the key components by subscribing to Application Hosting Services provided by Siemens.
EMM is highly adaptable and configurable to meet a wide range of market designs - from a simple Economic Dispatch based market to a complex Security Constrained Unit Commitment market. It also provides a very high degree of flexibility to adapt to changes in market rules within any chosen market structure.
The key components of the Siemens solution for centralized Market Operator Systems include:
- The Market Clearing Engine for clearing and scheduling of day-ahead, hour-ahead and real-time markets
- A Settlement Preprocessing Engine for managing Locational Marginal Pricing for ex-ante and ex-post settlements, including Congestion Revenue Rights processing
- A Market Information Repository that strictly adheres to a standardized data model resulting from a collaborative effort by key stakeholders to expand the Common Interface Model to include Market Operations
- A Market Participants Interface, a highly automated bid processing and notification infrastructure for efficient bid collection, validation and posting of market clearing results
- A Market Rules Engine as an integral part of the Market Participant Interface that enables an implementation independent, flexible means to define complex bid validation rules and to enforce compliance by all market participants
- A Transmission Security Assessment Engine utilizing a full AC network model including transmission constraints that guarantees satisfaction of reliability criteria during market operation
- The Spectrum PowerCC Historical Information System, a high performance data warehousing system for archiving of all market data and related operational data including revenue information from meters
- The Spectrum PowerCC Information Model Manger, an efficient, EPRI CIM-compliant model creation and maintenance tool that includes incremental merging of models provided by market participants and transmission service providers
- An integration platform that uses a service oriented architecture with XML formatted messages (based on the CIM Market Extensions) and a message-oriented middleware
- The Sinaut Spectrum Energy Management System providing control and monitoring functionality for single and multiple Control Area operations
Siemens’ EMM is built on a modern n-tier architecture utilizing best practices from similar well established e-businesses. The system is composed of clearly identified functional modules and related standardized interfaces. The technology platform of the EMM system includes leading third party standard and de-facto standard technologies for database services, communications, security, and user interface/web services. The use of industry standards enables deployment of the EMM system on Unix, Linux or Microsoft Windows platforms, offering choices that best fit the specific IT strategy of individual enterprises. Heavy reliance on industry standards and de-facto standards in hardware and software platforms guarantees long term IT investment protection.
For Loads, Producers and Transmission Providers:
- Fair, fact-based pricing through
- Locational Marginal Pricing
- Clears the market at a consistently lower price
For Market Operators:
- Flexibility in defining market-rules and implementing an automated market participation process.
- Solving congestion the Day-Ahead inherently increases the Transmission Security , making the day-to-day operations easier.
- Producing the identical and predictable solution for a set of given resources and bids greatly reduces the risk of disputes between stake holders and may limit liabilities of the Market Operator.
- A Robust platform providing the highest level of system availability through integration of market leading hardware and software for relational databases, business rules and optimization engines, middleware and web technology
- Rapid delivery and deployment of a Market Operator System made possible by combining mature, robust 3 rd party software with the Siemens core expertise of producing best-in-class solutions for operating electric grids
- An option to verify anticipated lower market clearing prices when using the Siemens technology through a short pilot study including comparison with legacy algorithms
The Market Clearing Engine is the core of Spectrum PowerCC Energy Market Management and is based on the Security Constrained Unit Commitment (SCUC) software. For the first time ever, the Market Clearing Engine does not impose artificial limitations on the design of centralized electric energy markets. It is now possible to include all relevant production, load and network constraints when clearing the central spot market simultaneously for energy and ancillary services. This solution approach, known as co-optimization of energy and ancillary services, produces the lowest overall clearing prices while meeting all physical constraints and grid security objectives.
Superior Technology; Optimal Solution
The Siemens technology utilizes advanced Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) techniques combined with a Separable Quadratic Interior Point Method to obtain the optimal SCUC solution. The MIP based SCUC represents the next step when compared to the traditional Lagrange Relaxation based SCUC.
Improving Reliability, Achieving the Lowest Prices
These breakthrough technologies enable market designs based on a full AC network model, allowing Market Operators to manage congestion well before it gets to real-time. This may be inherently more complex, but the Siemens technology is capable of managing the complexity and actually makes day-to-day interactions between Market Operators and Participants simpler and more transparent. Handling a large number of transmission constraints is one of the most important aspects in achieving feasible schedules and avoiding the high cost of congestion management in real-time, when available resources may be scarce and expensive.
One Engine for Multiple Markets – Achieving Flexibility
The Market Clearing Engine is designed for easy activation/de-activation of variables, various objective functions and constraints, enabling easy switching between the different runs such as a full Security Constrained Unit Commitment, a Reliability Commitment, a Security Constrained Dynamic Dispatch or a Security Constrained Economic Dispatch. This built-in flexibility enables the use of the same market-clearing engine in multiple market structures such as a Day-Ahead Market or a Real-Time Market.
The speed necessary to facilitate the flexibility of solving the different optimization problems using the same engine is achieved by applying Siemens' domain knowledge, the superior MIP technology and innovative computing platforms.
Comparison of Siemens' Market Clearing Engine Capability with Traditional Lagrange Based Methods
At the core of the Market Clearing for centralized markets is the Security Constrained Unit Commitment and Economic Dispatch, a complex optimization problem.
The optimization algorithm chosen must be able to produce a solution within minutes to support all coordination efforts necessary between market operators and participants. A traditional way to meet the time requirements has been to relax the optimization problem and not include all real-life parameters and constraints, risking real-time congestion and unpredictable market clearing prices.
| Function | Siemens MIP | Traditional Lagrange |
| Known distance from optimal solution | Yes | No |
| Modeling of large number of coupling constraints | Yes | No |
| Ramp rate as function of unit loading | Yes | No |
| Modeling of forbidden regions with crossing rules | Yes | No |
| Heuristics or manual intervention required to achieve a feasible solution | No | Yes |
| Optimal discrete relaxation of infeasible constraints | Yes | No |
| Flexibility for adding new constraints and models | Yes | No |
Optimizing Processes and Flexibility
The Market Operator and Market Participants interact through the Market Participant Interface, a set of secure, web-based User Interface and Web Services presented in a web portal. Market Participants perform all day-to-day transactions such as enter bids and bid extension, and access current and historical Market Prices, Schedules, Load Forecasts and Settlement information, through personalized views of the portal, automating and optimizing all interaction with the market.
Highest levels of transparency of the market state and processes is achieved through the integration of notification and instant messaging capabilities, and the presentation and availability of data, all within a secure, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-based environment.
User Interface
The Market Participant User Interface is a set of web-enabled, dynamic pages that presents data and information in tabular and graphical forms including scalable displays for network information. It requires no software installation other than a standard web browser and standard Scalable Vector Graphics) SVG viewer and Java plug-ins. All generated pages are pure HTML and Javascript and the scalable displays are in SVG XML format. Dynamic data updates in these displays, as well as dynamic messaging, alarms and notifications are enabled by the use of a Java applet.
Security
A modern, n-tier architecture is used for security with distinct web, application and database tiers. Use of either an existing corporate Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), B2B-enabled PKI or a separate market-dedicated PKI allows the use of digital certificates or biometric devices for authentication and authorization, ensuring non-repudiation for all transactions.
Adapt to Changing Market Rules
The Market Participant Interface incorporates a business rules engine component, which allows immediate validation of input data from the Market Participant. Data submissions from the Market Participant can be immediately verified for compliance to market rules, and feedback provided instantly.
The Market Operator has the flexibility to rapidly adapt to regulatory changes and evolving market rules by using a visual development environment for creating, editing and testing business and market rules. New or modified rules can be deployed without requiring software changes or downtime.