Currently, the Market Participation algorithm will accept two types of price information: the hourly price of electrical energy and the hourly value of balancing capacity. Each of these sets of price data must be provided to the tool as comma-separated values (CSV).
Energy price information will drive the operation of the energy storage system toward arbitrage or economic dispatch, where the benefit to the project owner is the difference in energy price during periods of buying (ESS charging) and selling (ESS discharging) minus the cost of losses. Energy price data should be provided in dollars per megawatt-hour ($/MWh) for each hour of the load period.
Balancing prices represent the value in each hour of reserved energy capacity to either absorb excess generation (balancing down) or to serve unmet load (balancing up). These balancing up and balancing down prices should be provided in dollars per megawatt ($/MW) for every hour of the load period. In the absence of balancing signals, this algorithm reserves the necessary capacity to perform this balancing service when it is economically advantageous, but assumes that balancing actions taken are energy neutral within the hour.