Network-Constrained Day-Ahead Auction for Consumer Payment Minimization

This paper presents an alternative day-ahead auction based on consumer payment minimization for pool-based electricity markets. This auction is an instance of price-based market clearing wherein market-clearing prices are explicitly modeled as decision variables of the optimization. The auction design includes network constraints, inter-temporal constraints associated with generation scheduling, and marginal pricing. Hence, consumer payment is expressed in terms of locational marginal prices. The proposed solution approach is based on bilevel programming. In the upper-level optimization, generation is scheduled with the goal of minimizing the total consumer payment while taking into account that locational marginal prices are determined by a multiperiod optimal power flow in the lower level. In this bilevel programming setting, locational marginal prices are the Lagrange multipliers or dual variables associated with the nodal power balance equations of the lower-level problem. The resulting mixed-integer linear bilevel program is transformed into an equivalent single-level mixed-integer linear program suitable for efficient off-the-shelf software. This transformation relies on the application of results from duality theory of linear programming and integer algebra. The proposed methodology has been successfully applied to several test systems including the IEEE 118-bus system. Numerical results have been compared with those obtained from declared social welfare maximization.