Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Abstract
The methodology used in the pricing of electrical energy is a fundamental characteristic of electricity market design.
In deregulated North American power systems the utilization of locational marginal pricing is the dominant approach
to pricing electrical energy. Locational marginal prices (LMPs), which are spatially and temporally distinguished nodal
prices based upon short-run marginal costs, reflect economic and physical realities of the power system as well as operating
constraints. In addition, LMPs can be used to ascertain transmission congestion costs and are often included in ancillary
service market clearing or settlement calculations. It is therefore requisite to understand the fundamentals of LMPs to be
able to analyze deregulated North American power system economics. In this paper, the concept, calculation, utilization
and practical application of LMPs as well as a thorough educational illustration are provided.
Solving (1) for each market period is not practical in most where ∆PG,i and ∆PD,i are the changes in real power
market applications due to computational and implemen- production and consumption from the operating point, and
OG,i (∆PG,i ) and OD,i (∆PD,i ) are the offers and bids as- 4.1 Study System Parameters
sociated with the changes, respectively. The hypothetical
changes to power production and consumption must re-
spect the power balance equation, generator and dispatch- The study system is comprised of four buses and four
able load limits: branches with equal reactances of 0.10 p.u. The corre-
sponding ISFs for a unit of power produced at each bus
N N
X X with Bus 1 arbitrarily selected as the reference is shown in
∆PG,i − ∆PD,i = 0 (8)
i=1 i=1
Table 1.
min max
∆PG,j ≤ ∆PG,j ≤ ∆PG,j ∀j ∈ (1, . . . , N ) (9) Table 1: Injection Shift Factors
min max
∆PD,j ≤ ∆PD,j ≤ ∆PD,j ∀j ∈ (1, . . . , N ) (10)
Injection Branch Terminus Buses
where the superscript max and min refer to the maximum Bus 1–2 2–3 2–4 4–3
and minimum changes to real power production and con- 1 0 0 0 0
sumption at each node, respectively. In addition to the con- 2 −1 0 0 0
straints in (8)–(10), the limitations on branch flow must be
3 −1 −0.667 −0.333 −0.333
obeyed:
4 −1 −0.333 −0.667 0.333
N
X
− Fkmax ≤ {(∆PG,i + PG,i )ψk,i } −
i=1 Table 1 is interpreted as follows. Concerning the second
N
X row, if 1 MW of power is injected in Bus 2 and withdrawn
{(∆PD,i + PD,i )ψk,i } ≤ Fkmax ∀k ∈ (1, . . . , K) from the reference bus, Bus 1, then 1 MW would flow from
i=1 Bus 2 to Bus 1. No power would flow on any other branch
(11) due to this injection. Therefore, since the ISF are direc-
tional, there is a −1 in the second column and zeros in the
where Fkmax is the magnitude of the maximum power flow
third through fifth columns. For the third row, the power
limit on branch k. In certain markets, only branches at or
flow resulting from an injection of 1 MW of power into
approaching their limits are included in (11).
Bus 3 divides between the branches in accordance with the
Solving (7) produces the Lagrangian multipliers λs and µk .
branch impedances enroute to the reference bus. Account-
The Lagrangian multiplier, λs , is associated with the power
ing for the direction of the ISFs defined in Table 1 and due
balance equality constraint (8), whereas µk is associated
to the equal branch impedances, one third the power flows
with branch power flow constraint. There is a µk for each
from Bus 3 to Bus 4 and then to Bus 2; two thirds of the
constraint in (11).
power flows from Bus 3 to Bus 2. The entire unit of power
A consequence of utilizing the dc system model is that flows from Bus 2 to Bus 1. The elements in Table 1 for the
voltage, stability and reactive power constraints cannot be other bus injections are calculated in a similar fashion.
explicitly modeled. In practical application, these con-
straints are approximately represented and enforced in The system has three generators, whose technical and eco-
LMP calculation as real power branch flow constraints. nomic data are shown in Table 2. In this educational il-
lustration, it is assumed that generator offers are linear,
as described by the coefficient c1 and that the load is not
4 Educational Illustration dispatchable. Differentiation of the generator offer with
respect to power for each generator gives the offer-based
A four-bus study system is used to demonstrate the prac- marginal generation cost which is used in LMP calcula-
tical calculation of LMP under two scenarios: Uncon- tion. It is also assumed that the market period is one hour.
strained Case and Constrained Case. It is shown that in the For the purposes of clarity in illustration, voltage limits and
Unconstrained Case, the only non-zero component com- losses are ignored.
prising the LMP is the marginal generation price and hence
the LMPs are uniform. In the Constrained Case, conges- Table 2: Generator Data
tion in the network results in non-zero and non-uniform
Gen. c1 P max P min
congestions costs and there is differentiation in LMP. The
illustration also shows that the definition of the LMP as the Bus ($/MW) (MW) (MW)
cost to serve an additional increment of demand at each 1 20 500 0
node is equivalent to (6) if linear generator energy offer 3 25 200 0
functions are utilized. 4 30 200 0
4.2 Unconstrained Network $20/MWh at all buses.
The results for the Unconstrained Case are summarized in
The calculation of the LMP is intuitively demonstrated by
Table 3. The absence of congestion or other constraints
determining the change in total cost of supplying energy
has lead to uniform LMPs equal to the marginal generation
when the demand is independently increased at each bus
cost of $20/MWh. From the last two columns of Table 3, it
by 1 MW for one hour. The dispatch, load and resulting
is seen that money charged to the loads equals the money
branch flows are shown in Fig. 1 with a resulting total pro-
credited to the generators. Therefore, the RTO remains
duction cost of $8, 000, which is found by evaluating the
revenue neutral and there are no congestion costs.
generator offer functions at the given dispatch.
400 MW 1 2 3 0 MW
200 MW
Table 3: Unconstrained Case Results
LMP Generation Load Credit Charge
100 MW 300 MW Bus ($/MWh) (MW) (MW) ($) ($)
100 MW 100 MW 1 20 400 − 8,000 0
2 20 − 100 0 2,000
4 3 20 0 300 0 6,000
4 20 0 0 0 0
0 MW
0 MW Total 8,000 8,000
401 MW 1 2 3 0 MW
200 MW
100 MW 300 MW
50 MW 50 MW
1 MW 100 MW 300 MW
100 MW 100 MW 4
4 0 MW
0 MW
0 MW
0 MW Figure 3: Illustrative 4-bus system for the constrained case.
Figure 2: Conceptualization of LMP calculation for Bus 1. The LMP for Bus 1 and 2 are the same as in the uncon-
strained case as Generator 1 can supply one additional MW
For Bus 2, an increase of load to 101 MW can be economi- of power without violating the branch limit. However, if
cally met by increasing the power output of Generator 1 to the load at Bus 3 is increased to 301 MW, Generator 1 can-
401 MW, resulting in an increase in operating costs by $20. not supply additional power since it would cause the power
Therefore the resulting LMP of Bus 2 is also $20/MWh. In flow on branch 4–3 to increase past it’s limit to 50.333
fact, since there are no constraints and marginal losses are MW. Instead, power must come from the next cheapest
ignored, the LMP at each node is equal to $20/MWh. This power source—Generator 3—whose increased power out-
result is applicable to any system with like conditions. put to 151 MW does not affect the power flow on branch 4–
This intuitive result is now compared with (6). Solving (7) 3 if the load is concomitantly increased to 301 MW. There-
yields a λs value equal to $20 and µk equal to zero for fore, the production cost increases to $8,775—an increase
all branches k. Therefore, from (6) the LMP is equal to of $25, and hence the LMP at Bus 3 becomes $25. The vi-
sualization for this LMP calculation is provided in Fig. 4. manner is a significant advantage of LMPs and allows
for loads to hedge against high energy prices through fi-
250 MW 1 2 3 151 MW nancial instruments such as Financial Transmission Rights
100 MW
(FTRs) [12, 7].