Optimal bidding strategies in oligopoly markets considering bilateral contracts and transmission constraints

Abstract

In electricity industry with transmission constraints and limited number of producers, Generation Companies (GenCos) are facing an oligopoly market rather than a perfect competition one. Under oligopoly market environment, each GenCo may increase its own profit through a favorable bidding strategy. This paper investigates the problem of developing optimal bidding strategies of GenCos, considering bilateral contracts and transmission constraints. The problem is modeled with a bi-level optimization algorithm, where in the first level each GenCo maximizes its payoff and in the second level a system dispatch will be accomplished through an OPF problem in which transmission constraints are taken into account. It is assumed that each GenCo has information about initial bidding strategies of other competitors. Impacts of exercising market power due to transmission constraints as well as irrational biddings of the some generators are studied and the interactions of different bidding strategies on participants’ corresponding payoffs are presented. Furthermore, a risk management-based method to obtain GenCos’ optimal bilateral contracts is proposed and the impacts of these contracts on GenCos’ optimal biddings and obtained payoffs are investigated. At the end, IEEE 30-bus test system is used for the case study in order to demonstrate the simulation results and support the effectiveness of the proposed model.