Data-driven Analysis of Regional Capacity Factors in a Large-Scale Power Market: A Perspective from Market Participants

A competitive wholesale electricity market consists of thousands of interacting market participants. Driven by the variations of fuels costs, system loads and weathers, these market participants compete actively and behave variously in the power market. Although electricity markets tend to become more transparent, a large amount of market information is still not publicly available to market participants. Hence, data-driven analysis based on public data is crucial for market participants to better understand and model large-scale power markets, and ultimately to perform better in power trading. While most of the previous researches related to the large-scale power markets are based on the synthetic networks, a data-driven approach utilizing the real power market data is proposed in this paper. First, the power plants' monthly net generation and capacity data are obtained from U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and aggregated to figure out the monthly regional capacity factors which are used to characterize the market's regional behaviors for market participants. Then, the regional capacity factors are analyzed against the metered system loads and natural gas prices to study the generation behaviors in the power market. The analysis reveals the impacts of regional natural gas prices on capacity factors and the responses of generating behaviors to the system loads. The analysis results present the solid evidence and rational references for market participants to model and validate the large-scale power market in the future.