Accurate and Warm-Startable Linear Cutting-Plane Relaxations for ACOPF

We present a linear cutting-plane relaxation approach that rapidly proves tight lower bounds for the Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow Problem (ACOPF). Our method leverages outer-envelope linear cuts for well-known second-order cone relaxations for ACOPF along with modern cut management techniques. These techniques prove effective on a broad family of ACOPF instances, including the largest … Read more

Fidelity and interruption control for expensive constrained multi-fidelity blackbox optimization

This work introduces a novel blackbox optimization algorithm for computationally expensive constrained multi-fidelity problems. When applying a direct search method to such problems, the scarcity of feasible points may lead to numerous costly evaluations spent on infeasible points. Our proposed fidelity and interruption controlled optimization algorithm addresses this issue by leveraging multi-fidelity information, allowing for … Read more

Incentivizing Investment and Reliability: A Study on Electricity Capacity Markets

The capacity market, a marketplace to exchange available generation capacity for electricity production, provides a major revenue stream for generators and is adopted in several U.S. regions. A subject of ongoing debate, the capacity market is viewed by its proponents as a crucial mechanism to ensure system reliability, while critics highlight its drawbacks such as … Read more

On a Tractable Single-Level Reformulation of a Multilevel Model of the European Entry-Exit Gas Market with Market Power

We propose a framework that allows to quantitatively analyze the interplay of the different agents involved in gas trade and transport in the context of the European entry-exit system. Previous contributions have focused on the case of perfectly competitive buyers and sellers of gas, which allows to replace the respective market equilibrium problem by a … Read more

Sequential Pricing of Electricity

This paper investigates the design and analysis of price formation in wholesale electricity markets given variability, uncertainty, non-convexity, and intertemporal operating constraints. The paper’s primary goal is to develop a framework to assess the many resource participation models, reserve product definitions, and enhanced pricing methods that have arisen in U.S. systems, especially in the context … Read more

Optimization and Simulation for the Daily Operation of Renewable Energy Communities

Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are an important building block for the decarbonization of the energy sector. The concept of RECs allows individual consumers to join together in local communities to generate, store, consume and sell renewable energy. A major benefit of this collective approach is a better match between supply and demand profiles, and thus, … Read more

A Multicut Approach to Compute Upper Bounds for Risk-Averse SDDP

Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming (SDDP) is a widely used and fundamental algorithm for solving multistage stochastic optimization problems. Although SDDP has been frequently applied to solve risk-averse models with the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), it is known that the estimation of upper bounds is a methodological challenge, and many methods are computationally intensive. In practice, this … Read more

A Polynomial Algorithm for the Lossless Battery Charging Problem

This study presents a polynomial time algorithm to solve the lossless battery charging problem. In this problem the optimal charging and discharging schedules are chosen to maximize total profit. Traditional solution approaches have relied on either approximations or exponential algorithms. By studying the optimality conditions of this problem, we are able to reduce it to … Read more

A Tailored Derivative Instrument to Mitigate the Price-and-Quantity Risk faced by Wind Power Companies

The intermittent nature of wind generation combined with the well-known volatility of electricity spot prices expose Wind Power Companies (WPCs) committed to long-term forward contracts to the so-called price-and-quantity risk. Several instruments were designed in the past years to mitigate this risk exposure. However, most of them were mainly constructed to cope with only one … Read more

Accreditation, Performance, and Credit Risk in Electricity Capacity Markets

Many liberalized electricity markets use capacity mechanisms to ensure that sufficient resources will be available in advance of operations. Recent events have called into question the ability of capacity mechanisms to provide sufficient incentives for reliability. A core resource adequacy challenge is that, given the high value of reliable electricity, penalties for non-performance on capacity … Read more