Robust Short-term Planning of Combined Heat and Power Plants Participating in the Spot Market

Abstract Following the liberalization of the electricity market, many private producers have come into play through trading mechanism to ensure the balance between production and needs. This context is particularly beneficial for utilities plants such as Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants. In this context, a previous work has shown the economic and environmental benefits of implementing a decision support tool for short-term planning of CHPs using a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation. However, planning is subject to uncertainty about the steam demand that the plant must meet. A methodology is therefore put in place to obtain a robust production plan. The accuracy of this work is demonstrated with an industrial case study and shows significant improvements to obtain feasible plans under steam demand uncertainty.