Short term portfolio optimization for discrete power plant dispatching

In this article, we consider a public power service in the liberalized market, operating its own power plant and participating in the spot market. In the short-term horizon, the objective is to optimize the dispatch of the power plant in discreet steps. The public service has to meet the demand of its customers, while trading in the spot market where transaction costs apply. The power plant operation is subject to several technical constraints, as minimum down-/up-time, ramping constraints, minimum operation level constraints, minimum/maximum production per day, and the costs are given by the start-up costs, the operational cost following an efficiency curve and CO2 emission cost. This problem is modeled through a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation.