Electricity Deregulation

Andrew M. Ross

(e-mail me)
I did two projects with Prof. Shmuel S. Oren:
How is the California power grid doing right now?

Ramp constraints in power auctions

When generating companies can include ramp-rate constraints in their bids, they can gain profits by lying about (being overly conservative about) their constraints. This is currently dealt with in the following ways:

Our main theoretical tools are the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction and duality theory. Our paper

Designs for Ramp-Constrained Day-Ahead Auctions

was presented at the 36th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 2003.

Authors of Interest:

Links of Interest:


Regional Decomposition

We have been investigating the effects of partial dualization schemes on Optimal Power Flow mathematical programs. Because these programs are very large, it is hard to use all of the constraints. So, we want to move some of them into the objective function and penalize them (this is partial Lagrangian dualization). If we do this incorrectly, though, we can get an answer that is not feasible for the original problem. Read all about it:

Economic Congestion Relief Across Multiple Regions Requires Tradable Physical Flow-gate Rights, S.S. Oren and A.M. Ross, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Feb. 2002, Volume 17, Number 1, pages 159-165.

Also available in this Draft Preprint. This paper has also been posted at This report cites a previous report, Partial Dualization and the Optimal Power Flow Problem .

Other links of interest: