Dealing With Inefficiencies of Electricity Markets by Internalization of Negative Externalities of the Operational Restrictions of Generating Units

Abstract

Economic efficiency is the main goal of all markets, including the electricity market. Technical and pecuniary restrictions, known as externalities, caused by the technical limits of generation units are inherent in electricity markets and can significantly affect their economic efficiency. In this article, an efficient service-based method is proposed aimed at internalizing negative externalities in the electricity markets. The method employs services procured by energy storage systems and responsive demand to internalize the generation sector's technical externalities. For the optimal capacity and price of the proposed service, bi-level optimization and an innovative discriminatory pricing scheme are applied. In this way, the first-best optimal market solution can be reached by internalizing the negative externalities in the sub-optimal second-best solution due to the generators' operational constraints. Numerical case studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, where considering nearly 5% responsive demand and storage capacity around 5% of peak load, it is possible to achieve economic efficiency by reducing the total cost. In real power systems, this cost reduction can result in millions of dollars in annual operational cost savings.