Towards electricity markets accommodating uncertain offers

The use of renewable energy sources of energy and in particular wind and solar has been on the rise over the last decades with plans to increase it even more. Such developments introduce significant challenges in existing power systems and can result in high electricity prices and costly infrastructure investments.

In this paper we propose a new electricity market mechanism whereby the uncertain and dynamic nature of wind power and other stochastic sources is embedded in the market mechanism itself, by modelling producers’ bids as probabilistic estimates. An extension on the bilevel programming formulation of an electricity market, based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS) reduces the impact of poor estimates for both the stochastic producers and the system operator.

We introduce a simulation setting which first demonstrates that impact and then proceed to illustrate the main features our market setup and compare it with a conventional electricity market and a standard bilevel setup.