Designing an incentive contract menu for sustaining the electricity market

Abstract

This paper designs an incentive contract menu to achieve long-term stability for electricity prices in a day-ahead electricity market. A bi-level Stackelberg game model is proposed to search for the optimal incentive mechanism under a one-leader and multi-followers gaming framework. A multi-agent simulation platform was developed to investigate the effectiveness of the incentive mechanism using an independent system operator (ISO) and multiple power generating companies (GenCos). Further, a Q-learning approach was implemented to analyze and assess the response of GenCos to the incentive menu. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the incentive contract.