Managing Availability, Quality and Security in a Restructured Electricity Industry with Reference to the Australian National Electricity Market

An AC electricity industry operates by establishing and maintaining near-sinusoidal voltage waveforms at end-user premises. Electricity markets in a restructured electricity industry should replicate this behavior as far as possible. In particular, they should allow end-users to specify the values they place on quality of electrical energy and allow them to manage their future risk levels associated with availability and quality of supply. This property is needed to allocate resources to support a cost-effective flow of end-use energy services in a risk-management context. Our research and experience with the Australian National Electricity Market suggest that the use of a forward-looking but short-term (eg 30 minutes) nodal spot market with associated ancillary service and derivative markets (aggregated to balance nodal precision and liquidity) would support an evolution of this kind subject to greater end-user participation in an enhanced electricity nodal spot market design employing voltage-value functions.