Coupled ISO-NE real-time energy and regulation markets for reliability with natural gas

Abstract

Reliability of the electricity grid against insufficient natural gas supply is becoming an increasingly relevant topic as the number of natural gas-fired generation units continues to grow. Without sufficient natural gas quantities at the market the loss of multiple generating units may occur with high probability. Existing power system operation practices are not designed to cope with the wide-spread fuel scarcity problem and great efforts are made by independent system operators (ISOs) and pipeline operators to improve interdependent system resiliency at all levels. In this paper we propose a combined real-time and regulation market which includes fuel scarcity signal to balance the requirements for optimal and resilient generation dispatch near real-time. The proposed approach is based on a distributed decision making algorithm known as dynamic market mechanism (DMM). On an example of the IEEE 14 bus system we show how the newly derived coupled market mechanism compares to today's decoupled operation of ISO-NE real-time and regulation markets under insufficient natural gas supply.