Senior Power Trader

Basic Purpose

Facilitates power and gas trading activities through the development of hourly transaction plans and economic/ capacity position reporting.  Trends and projects hourly demand, and economically dispatches generation resources for current and forward hours. Evaluates and determines optimal utilization of available energy resources in response to changing operating conditions, power and gas markets and contractual obligations on a real-time basis. Submits base schedules for available capacity and ancillary services for participation in the CAISO Western Energy Imbalance Market (EIM).

Essential Education, Skills, and Environment
Education and Work Experience
Bachelor’s degree from an accredited school and 4 years of experience in energy trading, balancing operations, or relevant experience.

Candidates that do not possess a bachelor’s degree must have a minimum of 8 years of related work experience.

Specialized Knowledge and Skills

Demonstrated knowledge of:

• Power system economics, economic dispatch
• Generator efficiency and energy trading.
• Electric system operations, generation production cost modeling, the Western Electric Coordinating Council (WECC) interconnected transmission system, NERC and WECC regulations/guidelines and the Western Systems Power Pool agreements.

  Demonstrated skills such as:

• Working and concentrating in a fast-paced environment with short-decision time frame.

Equipment and Applications
PCs, word processing, spreadsheet and database programs

Work Environment and Physical Demands
May require working a rotation shift schedule to cover 24x7 operations which includes nights, weekends, and holidays. General office environment. No special physical demands required

Develops and implements operational plans for meeting customer demand while optimizing available resources.

• Assesses real-time operating conditions relative to generation, transmission, fuel, pipeline capacity and other related elements.
• Utilizes forecasting tools to trend and project hourly load forecasts for the current and forward real-time operating period.
• Utilizes modeling tools to create transaction grids and operational plans, interprets results and identifies modeling errors.
• Determines pricing and volume of purchase and sale transaction to optimize the portfolio of company owned resources.
• Develops remedial action recommendations in response to abnormal conditions (i.e. loss of generating units, reserve deficiency and/or as directed by the Balancing Authority.
• Assists power traders with tagging and network transmissions reservations as needed for energy scheduling.
• Manages the usage of fuel and hydro allocations within operational and contractual constraints.
• Communicates with the Balancing Authority on generation schedules, reserve requirements and transactions needed for reliability.
• Supports participation within the EIM by reviewing and submitting hourly base schedules and focusing on passing hourly resource sufficiency evaluations

Reviews EIM performance data to identify dispatch anomalies and identify new strategies and opportunities for improvement.

Provides training as required for less experienced traders.

Maintains logs and other related documentation as required.  Produces reports and responds to data requests as needed.

Ensures all compliance aspects of position are known and followed; understands and complies with all policies, codes and regulations applicable to position and company. 

Performs related duties as assigned. 

Pay Range: $119,400.00-$140,400.00