A NEW CLUSTERING METHOD FOR PARTITIONING PRICE ZONE IN POWER MARKET ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

In order to reduce the difficulties in using nodal pricing, the notion of price zone is widely adopted in actual pricing scheme. The key for establishing simple and efficient zonal pricing scheme is to accurately partition transmission network in the presence of congestion. Unfortunately, in actual power market operation, operators usually establish price zones based on their experience, considering the locations of congested lines, without mathematical analysis. In order to achieve accurate price zone partition without any a priori partition knowledge, this paper firstly extracts the sensitivities of nodal power injections to power flows on all congested lines as cluster features of nodal price. Secondly, the scale-space theory simulating human visual system is introduced, and further a scale-space-based hierarchical clustering method for price zone partition is proposed. Finally, test results on IEEE 118-node system show the validity and feasibility of this proposed method.