Coordinating Commercial and Technical Decision-Making within a Restructured Electricity Industry

This paper explores the implications of a decisionmaking framework that adopts energy as the commodity on which commercial transactions are based and which solves the commercial and technical operation of the industry as separate processes that are formally linked through a bidirectional interface. Under these assumptions technical decision-makers gain some flexibility in terms of implementing the commercial transactions which in turn assists in overcoming different types of disturbances. The technical operation of the power system is accomplished through the use of model predictive control which has the benefit of continuously transitioning the system toward a future state that is consistent with both the agreed commercial solution as well as taking into account known technical issues that arise on short time-horizons. The method is illustrated for several examples.