No Arabic abstract
The electricity sector has tended to be one of the first industries to face technology change motivated by sustainability concerns. Whilst efficient market designs for electricity have tended to focus upon market power concerns, environmental externalities pose extra challenges for efficient solutions. Thus, we show that ad hoc remedies for market power alongside administered carbon prices are inefficient unless they are integrated. Accordingly, we develop an incentive-based market clearing design that can include externalities as well as market power mitigation. A feature of the solution is that it copes with incomplete information of the system operator regarding generation costs. It is uses a network representation of the power system and the proposed incentive mechanism holds even with energy limited technologies having temporal constraints, e.g., storage. The shortcomings of price caps to mitigate market power, in the context of sustainability externalities, are overcome under the proposed incentive mechanism.
We consider a two-stage electricity market comprising a forward and a real-time settlement. The former pre-dispatches the power system following a least-cost merit order and facing an uncertain net demand, while the latter copes with the plausible deviations with respect to the forward schedule by making use of power regulation during the actual operation of the system. Standard industry practice deals with the uncertain net demand in the forward stage by replacing it with a good estimate of its conditional expectation (usually referred to as a point forecast), so as to minimize the need for power regulation in real time. However, it is well known that the cost structure of a power system is highly asymmetric and dependent on its operating point, with the result that minimizing the amount of power imbalances is not necessarily aligned with minimizing operating costs. In this paper, we propose a mixed-integer program to construct, from the available historical data, an alternative estimate of the net demand that accounts for the power systems cost asymmetry. Furthermore, to accommodate the strong dependence of this cost on the power systems operating point, we use clustering to tailor the proposed estimate to the foreseen net-demand regime. By way of an illustrative example and a more realistic case study based on the European power system, we show that our approach leads to substantial cost savings compared to the customary way of doing.
Sustainability is a central concern for our society, and software systems increasingly play a central role in it. As designers of software technology, we cause change and are responsible for the effects of our design choices. We recognize that there is a rapidly increasing awareness of the fundamental need and desire for a more sustainable world, and there is a lot of genuine goodwill. However, this alone will be ineffective unless we come to understand and address our persistent misperceptions. The Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design aims to initiate a much needed conversation in and beyond the software community by highlighting such perceptions and proposing a set of fundamental principles for sustainability design.
Product cost heterogeneity across firms and loyalty models of customers are two topics that have garnered limited attention in prior studies on competitive price discrimination. Costs are generally assumed negligible or equal for all firms, and loyalty is modeled as an additive bias in customer valuations. We extend these previous treatments by considering cost asymmetry and a richer class of loyalty models in a game-theoretic model involving two asymmetric firms. Here firms may incur different non-negligible product costs, and customers can have firm-specific loyalty levels. We characterize the effects of loyalty levels and product cost difference on market outcomes such as prices, market share and profits. Our analysis and numerical simulations shed new light on market equilibrium structures arising from the interplay between product cost difference and loyalty levels.
In this paper we develop a novel method of wholesale electricity market modeling. Our optimization-based model decomposes wholesale supply and demand curves into buy and sell orders of individual market participants. In doing so, the model detects and removes arbitrage orders. As a result, we construct an innovative fundamental model of a wholesale electricity market. First, our fundamental demand curve has a unique composition. The demand curve lies in between the wholesale demand curve and a perfectly inelastic demand curve. Second, our fundamental supply and demand curves contain only actual (i.e. non-arbitrage) transactions with physical assets on buy and sell sides. Third, these transactions are designated to one of the three groups of wholesale electricity market participants: retailers, suppliers, or utility companies. To evaluate the performance of our model, we use the German wholesale market data. Our fundamental model yields a more precise approximation of the actual load values than a model with perfectly inelastic demand. Moreover, we conduct a study of wholesale demand elasticities. The obtained conclusions regarding wholesale demand elasticity are consistent with the existing academic literature.
Solving the optimal power flow (OPF) problem in real-time electricity market improves the efficiency and reliability in the integration of low-carbon energy resources into the power grids. To address the scalability and adaptivity issues of existing end-to-end OPF learning solutions, we propose a new graph neural network (GNN) framework for predicting the electricity market prices from solving OPFs. The proposed GNN-for-OPF framework innovatively exploits the locality property of prices and introduces physics-aware regularization, while attaining reduced model complexity and fast adaptivity to varying grid topology. Numerical tests have validated the learning efficiency and adaptivity improvements of our proposed method over existing approaches.