Market Power Assessment and Mitigation in Hydrothermal Systems

The objective of this paper is to investigate market power issues in bid-based hydrothermal scheduling. Initially, market power is simulated with a single-stage Nash-Cournot equilibrium model. Market power assessment for multiple stages is then carried through a stochastic dynamic programming scheme. The decision in each stage and state is the equilibrium of a multi-agent game. Thereafter, mitigation measures, specially bilateral contracts, are investigated. Case studies with data taken from the Brazilian system are presented and discussed.