Market modes for deregulated environment — A review

Deregulation is, restructuring the rules and economic incentives that the government setup to control and drive the Electric Supply Industry (ESI). It is also called as open power market, competitive power market, vertically unbundled market etc. With the introduction of deregulation, the electric power industry needs changes in various power system operation, control and planning activities. In this paper, it is attempted to perform a comprehensive review of research work done in the area of Unit Commitment (UC) under deregulated environment. In traditional UC, the objective is to produce power to satisfy the consumers with minimum production cost to meet the demand, whereas in the deregulated power market the generating companies (GENCOs) schedule their generators with a totally different objective of maximizing their profit with an inequality demand constraint. Hence this model is called as Profit/Price Based Unit Commitment (PBUC). This model is not uniform in all the countries. This paper presents a survey on various market models available in the literature.