Electricity market power: marginal cost and relative capacityeffects

摘要

Deregulation of electricity markets throughout the world requiresthat markets be constructed so as to insure fair and efficient prices.We investigate the use of a bilateral auction between agents as themarket clearing mechanism in which the agents learn to bid/askeffectively using a genetic algorithm. Market Power Indexes arecalculated for various configurations of relative capacity andproduction costs for the sellers in such a market and indications of theexercising of market power are sought. We found no statisticallysignificant market power effect due to relative marginal costs orcapacities. However, this absence of market power effects appears to bea consequence of the small number of sellers and the manner in which thestandard genetic algorithm used to model seller learning actuallyprevents the sellers from exploiting their comparative advantages