Electricity market model with starting-up, shutting-down and commitment variables

This paper presents a perfect competition model of an electricity market that takes into account the starting-up, shutting-down and commitment variables. These variable are modeled through binary variables. The use of binary decision variables makes the cost functions discontinuous and dual variables questionable as equilibrium prices. If the market prices were set to the value of the dual variables, some units could have operational losses; and these units would rather not to enter in the market. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a methodology that find the market solution using a cost minimization problem. The cost-minimization problem is first solved taking into account the integratility of the binary variables, and then it is solved relaxing the binary variables. A third optimization problem is used to eliminate the differences between both solutions. This methodology can be seen as a stylized representation of sequential markets. Finally, the proposed methodology is validated through a numerical example.