A computationally efficient approach to optimizing offers in centrally committed electricity markets
研究了集中承诺与自我承诺两种电力市场设计对发电企业激励的影响，提出一种高效求解双层优化问题的方法，发现集中承诺设计能降低系统成本并抑制市场力。
We study the incentive properties of the two primary approaches to incorporating unit-commitment decisions in wholesale electricity markets. One approach is centralized unit commitment, wherein generating firms provide complex multi-part offers that specify their non-convex fixed and variable operating costs. The market operator uses these offers to co-optimize unit-commitment and economic-dispatch decisions. The second approach is self-commitment, whereby firms determine unit-commitment decisions for their generating units individually and submit simple offers for the provision of energy. Operators of self-committed markets determine generator dispatch based on the merit order of the simple offers. Comparing the incentive properties of the two market designs is challenging because the offer-optimization problem for a firm that participates in a centrally committed market is a bi-level model with binary variables in the lower-level problem. To address this challenge, we develop a computationally efficient approach to solve such a problem and illustrate the method with examples. We use the examples to compare the incentive properties of the two market designs. Our examples show that the profit of the profit-maximizing firm does not differ significantly between the two market designs but that system costs can be higher under a self-committed design. These cost differences are because the complex offers and discriminatory payment schemes that are used under centrally committed designs can mitigate incentives for the profit-maximizing firm to exercise market power.