Conleigh Byers


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Byers

First Name

Conleigh

ORCID

0000-0002-0442-4172

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Publications 1 - 7 of 7
  • Additional Capacity Value from Synergy of Variable Renewable Energy and Energy Storage
    Item type: Journal Article
    Byers, Conleigh; Botterud, Audun (2020)
    IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy
  • Capacity market design and renewable energy: Performance incentives, qualifying capacity, and demand curves
    Item type: Journal Article
    Byers, Conleigh; Levin, Todd; Botterud, Audun (2018)
    The Electricity Journal
  • Price Formation in Electricity Market Design
    Item type: Doctoral Thesis
    Byers, Conleigh (2023)
    This work examines how we can derive economic signals from the non- convex optimal value functions of mixed integer programs used to dispatch resources in the power grid. The objectives of market design and price formation are to promote economic efficiency, by providing prices that support social surplus-maximizing operations in the short-run and investment in the long-run. Under certain restrictive conditions, these are prices that reflect short-run marginal costs (including scarcity costs), and provide recovery of fixed costs in the long-run. Two critical features of electricity limit its ability to achieve the theoretical microeconomic ideal of perfect long-run cost recovery via marginal pricing: the physics of the grid and non-convex costs of generators. This thesis uses a series of engineering-economic models of optimal power plant scheduling and investment to explore alternative market designs to maximize the economic surplus of consumers. Chapter 2 provides the mathematical theory to compare central planning and markets. Chapters 3, 6, and 7 examine short-run market design to manage transmission congestion, the impact of near-optimal solutions under elastic demand, and market power in non-convex markets, while Chapters 4 and 5 focus on investment, modeling the long-run investment efficiency implications of alternative short-run designs for deriving prices when operating costs are non-convex and shares of variable renewable energy increase.
  • Long-run optimal pricing in electricity markets with non-convex costs
    Item type: Journal Article
    Byers, Conleigh; Hug, Gabriela (2023)
    European Journal of Operational Research
    Determining optimal prices in non-convex markets remains an unsolved challenge. Non-convex costs are critical in electricity markets, as startup costs and minimum operating levels yield a non-convex optimal value function over demand levels. While past research largely focuses on the performance of different non-convex pricing frameworks in the short-run or uses convex approximations, we determine long-run adapted resource mixes associated with each pricing framework while preserving the full extent of the non-convex operations. We frame optimal pricing in terms of social surplus achieved and transfer of consumer to producer surplus in adapted long-run market equilibria. We find that convex hull pricing achieves the highest social surplus and is also associated with the lowest transfer of consumer to producer surplus. Marginal prices determined by fixing integer variables to their optimal values in the pricing run are also associated with high social surplus and high consumer surplus when the optimality gap in the original mixed integer linear program is very small. Other pricing frameworks tend to over-compensate inframarginal units, leading to resource mixes with lower social surplus and a greater transfer of consumer surplus to producer surplus in the long-run.
  • Flexibility Compensation with Increasing Stochastic Variable Renewable Energy in Non-Convex Markets
    Item type: Conference Paper
    Byers, Conleigh; Hug, Gabriela (2022)
    2022 17th International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems (PMAPS)
    Increasing shares of variable renewable energy (VRE) on the grid requires more flexible operation of other generation technologies. In an ideal energy-only market, prices should adequately compensate flexibility provision. While long-run cost recovery of generators can be achieved in a convex setting with marginal pricing, electricity markets exhibit non-convex costs and require non-convex pricing methods. We investigate how increasing VRE penetration impacts the type of technologies built, their payoffs, social surplus, and price distributions in a long-run resource mix adapted to a number of different non-convex pricing models. We find that non-convex energy-only markets can provide long-run cost recovery for flexible generators even as VRE penetration increases and that the impact of non-convexities decreases with increasing VRE.
  • Economic impacts of near-optimal solutions with non-convex pricing
    Item type: Journal Article
    Byers, Conleigh; Hug, Gabriela (2022)
    Electric Power Systems Research
    We explore the relationship between consumer and producer surplus and optimality gaps in mixed-integer linear programming applied to electricity markets. We analyze a long-run adapted resource mix and introduce flexible demand. This allows for comparison of total producer and consumer surplus achieved across near-optimal solutions under different non-convex pricing models. Results indicate that for pricing models dependent on the primal solution, consumer surplus generally increases (although not monotonically) with increasing optimality and producer surplus correspondingly decreases. Short-run cost recovery is also possible over the operating horizon without make-whole payments for all models examined. These results are highly influenced by scarcity rent from price-setting elastic demand.
  • Modeling flow-based market coupling: Base case, redispatch, and unit commitment matter
    Item type: Conference Paper
    Byers, Conleigh; Hug, Gabriela (2020)
    2020 17th International Conference on the European Energy Market (EEM)
    As Europe moves to expand flow-based market coupling (FBMC) to other regions, revisiting key modeling elements is crucial to interpreting results of different studies. In contrast to nodal pricing, FBMC is a zonal pricing approach that involves approximations of the underlying grid topology. The choice of base case, method of redispatch, whether unit commitment constraints are included, and whether results consider pay-as-bid or market-clearing prices vary widely across published papers. We demonstrate that different methods can have a substantial impact on overall costs. We find that existing base case approaches perform poorly compared to a base case using the nodal solution across all modeling choices considered. © 2020 IEEE.
Publications 1 - 7 of 7