A New Dynamic Pricing Model based on Convex Hull Pricing

Abstract: This paper presents a new dynamic pricing model (a.k.a. real-time pricing) that reflects startup costs of generators. Dynamic pricing, which is a method to control demand by pricing electricity at hourly (or more often) intervals, has been studied by many researchers. They assume that the cost functions of suppliers are convex, although they may be nonconvex because of the startup costs of generators in practice. We provide a dynamic pricing model that takes into account such cost functions within the settings of unit commitment problems (UCPs). Our model gives convex hull price (CHP), which has not been used in the context of dynamic pricing, though it is known that the CHP minimizes the uplift payment which is disadvantageous to suppliers for a given demand. In addition, we apply an iterative algorithm based on the subgradient method to solve our model. Numerical experiments show the efficiency of our model on reducing uplift payments. The prices determined by our algorithm give sufficiently small uplift payments in a realistic computational time.