Reliability implications of price responsive demand : a study of New England's power system

With restructuring of the traditional, vertically integrated electricity industry come new opportunities for electricity demand to actively participate in electricity markets. Traditional definitions of power system reliability have carried over from the vertically integrated market structure, but this thinking will become increasingly problematic as the proportion of electricity demand responsive to market prices increases. Using New England as an example, this thesis highlights these difficulties by employing a Probabilistic Production Costing model modified to account for price responsive demand. A Neural Gas clustering algorithm is used to deal with the time-varying nature of price responsive demand. We show that neglecting to account for price responsive demand could result in underestimating system reliability by traditional measures, and discuss a possible new metric to help the transition to thinking of reliability as one aspect of whole market performance.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Whitaker, Andrew C. (Andrew Craig)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ignacio Perez-Arriaga.

• Engineering Systems Division.
• Technology and Policy Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/69481

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/69481