Impact of Electricity Price Expectation in the Planning Period on the Evolution of Generation Expansion Planning in the Market Environment

Abstract

With the continuous promotion of China’s electricity market reform, the introduction of competition in the power generation market provides a new research direction for the generation expansion planning (GEP) problem, which is of great significance in the promotion of the optimization of the power energy structure. In the context of marketization, the electricity price expectation during the planning period is a key factor of GEP for independent power generation groups. There is some literature showing that the electricity price expectation in the planning period can be estimated according to certain laws of market supply and demand, while it seems to us that a future Pay as Bid (PAB) mechanism is better to determine the electricity price expectation. In this paper, to explore the impact of these two different electricity price formation mechanisms on the evolution of the generation market, a multi-agent framework is first established to describe the interaction process among the generation market agents; then, a GEP model for independent power generation groups is developed in the market competition environment, and four representative scenarios are finally designed for detailed comparative studies. Based on these case studies, the conclusion can be summarized as: (1) the PAB bidding mechanism has a lower electricity price and higher market installed capacity almost all the time during the whole planning period for all four scenarios; (2) it is more important that PAB can reduce the impact of parameter uncertainty in the laws of market supply and demand, which can obtain more reliable and reasonable results regarding the long-term evolution of the generation market.