Scheduling and Pricing of Coupled Energy and Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Reserves

TLDR

Current electricity markets often clear energy and reserves sequentially, but this sequential approach can reduce social welfare; simultaneous market clearing has been proposed, though it typically relies on exogenous rules that ignore actual operating conditions. This study investigates an alternative simultaneous market‑clearing method that provides a single price for all reserve types at a bus under marginal pricing. The authors propose a simultaneous, security‑constrained market‑clearing framework that eliminates rule‑of‑thumb scheduling, offering deterministic and probabilistic implementations and demonstrating how primary and tertiary reserve coupling influences schedules and prices. The common reserve price equals the nodal marginal cost of security.

Abstract

Current practice in some electricity markets is to schedule energy and various reserve types sequentially, first clearing the energy market, followed by the reserves needed. Since distinct reserve services can in fact be strongly coupled, and the heuristics required to bridge the various sequential markets can ultimately lead to loss of social welfare, simultaneous energy/reserves market-clearing procedures have been proposed and are in use. However, they generally schedule reserve services subject to exogenous rules and parameters that do not relate to actual operating conditions. The weaknesses of the current approaches warrant the investigation of alternatives. In that regard, we present a different methodology to the simultaneous market clearing of energy and reserve services. This approach avoids the pitfalls of the sequential procedures, while at the same time its basis for scheduling reserve services does no longer rely on some rules of thumb. The salient feature of the proposed approach is that, under marginal pricing, it yields a single price for all reserve types scheduled at a bus, unlike the current approaches. We show that this common price is given by the nodal marginal cost of security. We present two specific implementations of a simultaneous security-constrained market-clearing procedure, one deterministic and one probabilistic. An example of joint market clearing of energy with reserves required for primary and tertiary regulation illustrates how their strong coupling affects their schedule and prices.