Electricity transmission pricing: Tracing based point-of-connection tariff

Point-of-connection (POC) scheme of transmission pricing in decentralized markets charges the participants a single rate per MW depending on their point-of-connection. Use of grossly aggregated postage stamp rates as POC charges fails to provide appropriate price signals. The POC tariff based on distribution of network sunk costs by employing conventional tracing assures recovery of sunk costs based on extent of use of network by participants. However, the POC tariff by this method does not accommodate economically efficient price signals which correspond to marginal costs. On the other hand, the POC tariff, if made proportional to marginal costs alone, fails to account for sunk costs and extent of use of network. This paper overcomes these lacunae by combining the above stated desired objectives under the recently proposed optimal tracing framework. Since, real power tracing problem is amenable to multiple solutions, it is formulated as linearly constrained optimization problem. By employing this methodology, consideration of extent of network use and sunk cost recovery are guaranteed, while objective function is designed such that the spatial pattern of price signals closely follows the pattern of scaled locational marginal prices. The methodology is tested on IEEE 30 bus system, wherein average power flow pattern is established by running various simulation states on congested and un-congested network conditions. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.