Course overview
This course provides a broad knowledge of the wholesale electricity market and power system operation in terms of energy and ancillary services. It includes the evolution of the power system industry and electricity market over time, rules and regulations, energy and ancillary services markets and transmission system operation with a focus on the Australian Electricity Market.
- Electricity Market Deregulation: History of electricity markets, vertically integrated utilities (VIU), problems with regulation, need for deregulation, entities in deregulated markets, market procedures, types of markets, deregulation evolution, market architecture, and open electrical energy markets.
- Microeconomics for Electricity Markets: Modelling consumers and suppliers.
- Microeconomics for Electricity Markets: Market equilibrium, Pareto efficiency, global welfare, theory of the firm (short-run and long-run), profit and fixed cost recovery, pool market pricing schemes, marginal cost fallacies, scarcity rent, economy of scale and scope, and market power.
- Fundamentals of Mathematical Optimisation: Basic definitions, linear programming, modelling tools and solvers (GAMS, MATLAB, Gurobi), problem formulation and implementation.
- Fundamentals of Mathematical Optimisation: Duality, mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), quadratic optimisation, nonlinear optimisation, and stochastic optimisation.
- Economic Dispatch: Basic definitions, ED formulation and characteristics, ED solution methods and implementation, multi-period ED with generator ramp limits.
- Economic Dispatch: Multi-objective ED with greenhouse gas emissions, value of lost load (VOLL), and energy storage modelling.
- Optimal Power Flow: AC optimal power flow (OPF) and DC OPF formulations as natural extensions of economic dispatch, and network losses estimation.
- Unit Commitment: Basic definitions, UC formulation, security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC), and network-constrained unit commitment (NCUC).
- Energy and Ancillary Services Co-optimisation: Definition and need for ancillary services (AS), brief introduction to contingency analysis, procuring AS, and co-optimisation of AS and energy spot markets.
- Renewable Integration and New Market Participants: Impact of intermittent renewables on electricity markets, intermittent renewable participation mechanisms, renewable generation prediction, operating electricity markets under uncertainty, and new market participants in evolving energy systems.
Course learning outcomes
- Describe the evolution from vertically integrated utilities to deregulated electricity markets, explain market architectures and participant roles, and apply microeconomic principles including supply-demand modelling, market equilibrium, welfare economics, pricing schemes, and market power to electricity market analysis.
- Develop mathematical optimisation models from fundamental concepts, including linear programming (LP), mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), and quadratic optimisation, interpret duality and shadow prices, and implement solutions using GAMS and MATLAB with optimisation solvers.
- Formulate and solve economic dispatch (ED) problems including multi-period ED with ramp limits, multi-objective ED with emissions considerations, energy storage modelling, and value of lost load analysis.
- Formulate and solve optimal power flow (OPF) problems using AC and DC formulations, estimate network losses, and develop security-constrained and network-constrained unit commitment (UC) models.
- Describe ancillary services products and procurement mechanisms, explain contingency analysis fundamentals, and analyse the co-optimisation of energy and ancillary services in spot markets.
- Evaluate the impacts of intermittent renewable resources on electricity market operations, analyse renewable generation prediction and participation mechanisms, examine market operation under uncertainty, and identify the roles of new market participants such as virtual power plant operators.