Market power appearance through game theoretic maintenance scheduling of distributed generations

The oligopoly structure of the market and the network constraints may produce results far from the perfect competition. Maintenance decisions in an oligopolistic electricity market have a strategic function, because GENCOs usually have impacts on market prices through capacity outages. This paper describes generation maintenance planning in an oligopolistic environment as a strategic decision. In this paper a game theoretic framework is modeled to analyze strategic behaviors of GENCOs. Each GENCO tries to maximize its payoff by strategically making decisions, taking into account its rival GENCOs' decisions. Some GENCOs own DG units, such as wind, diesel, biomass and fuel cell plants. If different GENCOs find out they have the conditions of exerting market power exact in maintenance periods; they will share their data and they will cause some area monopolies. Cournot-Nash equilibrium is used for decision making on maintenance problem in Oligopolistic electricity market. The Cournot-Nash problem is modeled as a mixed integer nonlinear programming optimization problem. The analytic framework presented in this paper enables joint assessment of maintenance and generation strategies. © 2011 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. -All rights reserved