The construction of the risk surcharges for the imbalances trading on OTE market

This master thesis approaches the energy markets from the point of view of an electricity trader acting on the retail markets, in particular an electricity supplier to the end customers. The first part introduces the reader into the basic practices applied in the management process of the portfolio of end customers, which includes metering and evaluation of the real take-off, planning and prediction and, of course, final evaluation of the imbalances. Second part explains the principles of balance management in case of the entire ČEPS electrical grid, mechanics of the imbalances settlement and describes its actual setting with focus on the way it motivates the market participants for minimization of their own imbalances and therefore improvement of the overall electrical grid balance. The final part describes the basic construction of the risk surcharges, which the supplier adds to the commodity price to cover the costs caused by the existence of his end customers' imbalances. Furthermore, it is shown how the dependence on the system imbalance influences the size of the risk surcharge and the basic model is extended to include even this factor. Because the supplier does not set the surcharge at the level of individual end customer but for the entire portfolio, the functioning and power of the portfolio effect, which brings an extra savings in the imbalances settlement costs, is also explored in the final part. The possibility of dependence presence in the imbalances of individual end customers is also accounted for. For the first time in the Czech academic literature the economic problems that are faced by the electricity supplier to the end customers are examined and the analysis and solution of one important problem is provided in the full picture. However, the most important contribution of this master thesis lays in the opening of this topic to further examination on the academic ground.