Pricing of fluctuations in electricity markets
Name
1207.2848.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
615.81 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
0987e4bdc38e84e28804e82f9a0cc954
Author(s)
Tsitsiklis, John N.
Xu, Yunjian
Date Issued
April 2015
Journal
European Journal of Operational Research
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Tsitsiklis, John N., and Yunjian Xu. "Pricing of fluctuations in electricity markets." European Journal of Operational Research, 246, 1 (October 2015): 199-208.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
In an electric power system, demand fluctuations may result in significant ancillary cost to suppliers. Furthermore, in the near future, deep penetration of volatile renewable electricity generation is expected to exacerbate the variability of demand on conventional thermal generating units. We address this issue by explicitly modeling the ancillary cost associated with demand variability. We argue that a time-varying price equal to the suppliers' instantaneous marginal cost may not achieve social optimality, and that consumer demand fluctuations should be properly priced. We propose a dynamic pricing mechanism that explicitly encourages consumers to adapt their consumption so as to offset the variability of demand on conventional units. Through a dynamic game-theoretic formulation, we show that (under suitable convexity assumptions) the proposed pricing mechanism achieves social optimality asymptotically, as the number of consumers increases to infinity. Numerical results demonstrate that compared with marginal cost pricing, the proposed mechanism creates a stronger incentive for consumers to shift their peak load, and therefore has the potential to reduce the need for long-term investment in peaking plants. Keywords: OR in energy; Electricity market; Game theory; Dynamic pricing; Social welfare
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2015.04.020
