A Primal-Dual Formulation for Pricing Static Voltage Stability Services within a Unit Commitment Model

Abstract: In modern power systems with high penetration of Inverter-Based Resources (IBR), most converters operate in Grid-Following (GFL) mode. Some buses exhibit inherently low Short-Circuit Ratios (SCRs), a property majorly shaped by network topology. The integration of GFL-IBR onto such weak buses thus demands attention to static voltage stability. To address this issue, market mechanisms have been proposed to incentivize generators to provide voltage stability services, such as commitment of synchronous generators for reducing the equivalent impedance at low SCR buses and adaptive reactive power support from GFL-IBR. To compute shadow prices for these services, previously proposed methods such as the restricted' anddispatchable' approaches may fail to guarantee operating cost recovery for voltage-stability service providers. As the resulting prices are determined purely from a social surplus maximization objective, the profitability of units is entirely overlooked. This suggests that new pricing methodologies are needed to satisfy cost-recovery requirements. Therefore, this paper proposes a pricing method based on a primal-dual formulation. Case studies demonstrate that the proposed method can consistently produce revenue-adequate shadow prices, enabling all participating units to recover their costs without supplementary uplift payments.