Electricity portfolio management: Optimal peak/off-peak allocations

Electricity purchasers manage a portfolio of contracts in order to purchase the expected future electricity consumption profile of a company or a pool of clients. This paper proposes a mean-variance framework to address the concept of structuring the portfolio and focuses on how to optimally allocate positions in peak and off-peak forward contracts. It is shown that the optimal allocations are based on the difference in risk premiums per unit of day-ahead risk as a measure of relative costs of hedging risk in the day-ahead markets. The outcomes of the model are then applied to show (i) that it is typically not optimal to hedge a baseload consumption profile with a baseload forward contract and (ii) that, under reasonable assumptions, risk taking by the purchaser is rewarded by lower expected costs. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.