An MCP approach for hydrothermal coordination in deregulated power markets

This paper proposes a new methodology for addressing the long term operation planning of a generation company, fully adapted to represent both its annual and hyperannual hydrothermal power generation scheduling in a competitive market. The method explicitly states the electricity generation market equilibrium by analytically formulating the equations that express the optimal behavior of the existing generation companies, considering the technical constraints that affect the scheduling of their units. The subsequent system of nonlinear equations can be directly solved taking advantage of its mixed complementarity problem (MCP) structure, which allows for the use of special complementarity methods. A hydrothermal coordination model based on the proposed methodology has been developed and implemented in GAMS. A case study is also presented to show its successful application to the large-scale Spanish electric power system