An incentive mechanism for generation capacity investment in a price-capped wholesale power market

Abstract

In electricity markets, market rules such as price caps defer proper investment in generation. The resulting generation mix is therefore sub-optimal if compared to the one that maximizes social welfare. In this paper, an incentive mechanism for a price-capped multi-area energy only market is proposed. The market model is posed as a mixed complementarity problem using the optimality conditions of all the individual players that participate in the multi-area electricity market. The resulting equilibrium problem is solved using a decomposition approach based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers. The proposed solution algorithm takes advantage of the multi-area structure of the problem and outperforms state-of-the-art practices for solving these types of problems.