Since the inception of ISOs, Locational Marginal Prices (LMPs) alone were not market clearing or incentive compatible because an auction winner who offered its avoidable costs could lose money at the LMPs. ISOs used make-whole payments to ensure that market participants did not lose money. Make-whole payments were not public, creating transparency issues. Over time, … Read more
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
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
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 challenge is that penalties for non-performance on capacity obligations are lower than what theory would suggest is … Read more
Convex hull pricing provides a potential solution for reducing out-of-market payments in wholesale electricity markets. This paper revisits the theoretical construct of convex hull pricing and explores its important but underappreciated formulation-dependence property. Namely, convex hull prices may change for different formulations of the same unit commitment problem. After a conceptual exposition of the property, … Read more
In the absence of direct demand-side bids for certain reliability products in the wholesale electricity markets, Independent System Operators (ISOs) traditionally use fixed demand requirements with penalty factors to clear the market. This approach does not allow proper tradeoffs between reliability and cost due to the inelasticity of the fixed requirements. Therefore, ISOs have been … Read more
Electricity markets worldwide allow participants to bid non-convex production offers. While non-convex offers can more accurately reflect a resource’s capabilities, they create challenges for market clearing processes. For example, system operators may be required to execute side payments to participants whose costs are not covered through energy sales as determined via traditional locational marginal pricing … Read more
We consider spot-market trading of electricity including storage operators as additional agents besides producers and consumers. Storages allow for shifting produced electricity from one time period to a later one. Due to this, multiple market equilibria may occur even if classical uniqueness assumptions for the case without storages are satisfied. For models containing storage operators, … Read more
This paper examines multi-interval real-time markets in the context of US independent system operators (ISOs). We show that current ISO implementations that settle only the upcoming interval of the multi-interval solution can create incentive problems. Fundamentally, this is the result of each successive optimization problem treating historical losses as sunk costs. To solve the incentive … Read more
In the course of the energy transition, load and supply centers are growing apart in electricity markets worldwide, rendering regional price signals even more important to provide adequate locational investment incentives. This paper focuses on electricity markets that operate under a zonal pricing market design. For a fixed number of zones, we endogenously derive the … Read more