پروژه امگا: تخصیص تولید انرژی بازار آزاد در بازارهای برق مقررات زدایی شده

The OMEGA project is part of the 5th Framework Programme for R&D that the European Union has started in the year 2000. It is a highly complex and interdisciplinary project, with five countries and several companies involved. The project aims at developing a decision support system for electricity producers to support energy management and energy trading groups within these companies in the commercial activities on open and competitive electricity markets using an e-commerce framework. This paper presents the OMEGA project, describes the objectives pursued, evaluates the project workplan, shows the complex project management structure, highlights the management problems, and presents relevant conclusions.

Since the European Commission presented its White Paper on the Internal Energy Market back in 1988, and especially since the introduction of its first proposal for a Directive on common rules for the internal market in 1992, a very lively debate has gone on at the European Union level as well as in the national capitals of the EU Member States regarding the liberalization of energy markets, and in particular of the electricity industry. Some Member States such as the United Kingdom had already set out on their own liberalization course during the 1980s in pursuing a general policy of liberalization and privatization of regulated industries (telecommunications, financial services, water supply) and of the energy market in particular (gas, electricity). However, it is reasonable to say that the debate at the European level was kicked off and subsequently kept going by the ideas put forward by the European Commission for the liberalization of electricity and natural gas markets which were worked out in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although this European debate has not yet concluded, at the national level many policies for electricity competition and liberalization have been considered and discussed and in some cases are already being implemented by individual Member States, while at the European level the debate is continuing in full force.

OMEGA will offer the power generating companies significant advantages towards an effective operation in the new electricity markets: 1. It allows the exploitation of the potential offered by an e-commerce network for electricity trading. 2. It supports new organizational schemes to enable energy producers, commercializers and energy users to establish new (electricity) supplier/consumer relationships. Note that the new open market tendency (already a reality in several countries, and just about to be in many others all over the world) consists of allowing suppliers and consumers to participate in the market by fixing their contractual terms (energy quantity and price, duration and interruption penalties, etc.). 3. It integrates multi-disciplinary technological approaches in a very innovative way, by using emerging technologies. 4. It anticipates market needs in decision support systems for the new energy open markets.