As electric restructuring spreads rapidly across countries and states, leading industry experts are increasingly concerned that in many instances policy makers are pushing their proposals into practice more quickly than policy analysts can provide answers to difficult questions of market design. In this process, different structures for organizing this industry are evolving without a firm basic understanding of their implications for long-term market performance. There is a risk that, in the process, we may be inadvertently locked into an inferior market design that will be costly to change. Designing Competitive Electricity Markets develops some guiding principles to be used when evaluating alternative proposals for reorganizing the US electric power industry. Preliminary versions of the papers in this book were presented at a Workshop convened by the Electric Power Research Institute and held at Stanford University in March 1997. The authors are prominent economists, operation researchers, and engineers who have been instrumental in the development of the conceptual framework for electric power restructuring both in the United States and in other countries. Rather than espousing a particular market design for the industry's future, each author focuses on an important issue or set of issues and tries to frame the questions for designing electricity markets using an international perspective. The book focuses on the economic and technical questions important in understanding the industry's long-term development rather than providing immediate answers for the current political debates on industry competition. Extensive issues are covered, including: the role of the system operator; theproblems of ensuring longer-term investment in expanding the transmission system, and in industry research and development; the problems in pricing that are created by arbitrarily segmenting related markets; the relationship between efficiency in the near and long term; ownership rights and incentives; and designing experiments to better understand the operation of different auction mechanisms. The intended audience for this volume includes policy-makers, policy-oriented academics, and corporate leaders with an interest in designing workable and more efficient electricity markets. The arguments in each chapter are based upon sound economic principles but do not require expertise in mathematical modeling or technical economic analysis.

Over the years, the electric power industry has been using optimization methods to help them solve the unit commitment problem. The result has been savings of tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel costs. Things are changing, however. Optimization technology is improving, and the industry is undergoing radical restructuring. Consequently, the role of commitment models is changing, and the value of the improved solutions that better algorithms might yield is increasing. The dual purpose of this book is to explore the technology and needs of the next generation of computer models for aiding unit commitment decisions. Because of the unit commitment problem's size and complexity and because of the large economic benefits that could result from its improved solution, considerable attention has been devoted to algorithm development in the book. More systematic procedures based on a variety of widely researched algorithms have been proposed and tested. These techniques have included dynamic programming, branch-and-bound mixed integer programming (MIP), linear and network programming approaches, and Benders decomposition methods, among others. Recently, metaheuristic methods have been tested, such as genetic programming and simulated annealing, along with expert systems and neural networks. Because electric markets are changing rapidly, how UC models are solved and what purposes they serve need reconsideration. Hence, the book brings together people who understand the problem and people who know what improvements in algorithms are really possible. The two-fold result in The Next Generation of Electric Power Unit Commitment Models is an assessment of industry needs and new formulations and computational approaches that promise to make unit commitment models more responsive to those needs.

Over the years, the electric power industry has been using optimization methods to help them solve the unit commitment problem. The result has been savings of tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel costs. Things are changing, however. Optimization technology is improving, and the industry is undergoing radical restructuring. Consequently, the role of commitment models is changing, and the value of the improved solutions that better algorithms might yield is increasing. The dual purpose of this book is to explore the technology and needs of the next generation of computer models for aiding unit commitment decisions. Because of the unit commitment problem's size and complexity and because of the large economic benefits that could result from its improved solution, considerable attention has been devoted to algorithm development in the book. More systematic procedures based on a variety of widely researched algorithms have been proposed and tested. These techniques have included dynamic programming, branch-and-bound mixed integer programming (MIP), linear and network programming approaches, and Benders decomposition methods, among others. Recently, metaheuristic methods have been tested, such as genetic programming and simulated annealing, along with expert systems and neural networks. Because electric markets are changing rapidly, how UC models are solved and what purposes they serve need reconsideration. Hence, the book brings together people who understand the problem and people who know what improvements in algorithms are really possible. The two-fold result in The Next Generation of Electric Power Unit Commitment Models is an assessment of industry needs and new formulations and computational approaches that promise to make unit commitment models more responsive to those needs.

As electric restructuring spreads rapidly across countries and states, leading industry experts are increasingly concerned that in many instances policy makers are pushing their proposals into practice more quickly than policy analysts can provide answers to difficult questions of market design. In this process, different structures for organizing this industry are evolving without a firm basic understanding of their implications for long-term market performance. There is a risk that, in the process, we may be inadvertently locked into an inferior market design that will be costly to change. Designing Competitive Electricity Markets develops some guiding principles to be used when evaluating alternative proposals for reorganizing the US electric power industry. Preliminary versions of the papers in this book were presented at a Workshop convened by the Electric Power Research Institute and held at Stanford University in March 1997. The authors are prominent economists, operation researchers, and engineers who have been instrumental in the development of the conceptual framework for electric power restructuring both in the United States and in other countries.Rather than espousing a particular market design for the industry's future, each author focuses on an important issue or set of issues and tries to frame the questions for designing electricity markets using an international perspective. The book focuses on the economic and technical questions important in understanding the industry's long-term development rather than providing immediate answers for the current political debates on industry competition. Extensive issues are covered, including: the role of the system operator; the problems of ensuring longer-term investment in expanding the transmission system, and in industry research and development; the problems in pricing that are created by arbitrarily segmenting related markets; the relationship between efficiency in the near and long term; ownership rights and incentives; and designing experiments to better understand the operation of different auction mechanisms. The intended audience for this volume includes policy-makers, policy-oriented academics, and corporate leaders with an interest in designing workable and more efficient electricity markets.The arguments in each chapter are based upon sound economic principles but do not require expertise in mathematical modeling or technical economic analysis.