Efficient Formulation of Minimum Income Condition Orders on the All-European Power Exchange

Abstract

The unification of European day-ahead electricity markets leads to several challenging problems some of which arise from the mathematical formulation of the common power exchange (PX). The officially proposed clearing algorithm – called EUPHEMIA – is a hybrid framework containing diverse and quite complicated elements. The straightforward formulation of a few bid types – most importantly, the Minimum Income Condition (MIC) orders for suppliers – would refer the clearing into the category of non-convex mixed integer quadratically constrained programs (MIQCPs) which is one of the hardest class of optimization problems.
Several attempts have been made to efficiently execute the clearing but the question is not yet finally answered. A new formulation of MIC orders is presented to overcome the main hurdles making MIC orders a relatively simple addition to the usual convex mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) model of European PXs. Theoretical advances are discussed and initial tests are also provided for demonstration.