Heat and electricity market coordination: A scalable complementarity approach

Abstract The large penetration of stochastic and non-dispatchable renewable energy sources increases the need for operational flexibility in power systems. Flexibility can be unlocked by aligning the existing interactions and synergies between heat and power systems. However, in the current sequential order of heat and electricity market clearings, the heat market is myopic to its interactions with the electricity market. This paper designs a heat market, aimed at achieving the optimal coordination of heat and power systems while respecting the current market regulations. The proposed electricity-aware heat market yields a soft coordination between heat and power systems by endogenously modeling their interactions in the day-ahead heat market clearing. The proposed market framework requires to solve a hierarchical optimization problem under uncertainty, which can be computationally challenging in large-scale energy systems with many scenarios. To resolve this potential scalability issue, this paper develops an augmented regularized Benders decomposition algorithm. The performance of the proposed market framework is compared against the fully integrated and sequential market frameworks using an ex-post out-of-sample simulation. This comparison reveals that there is a significant room for improvement in the cost-effective operation of the overall energy system. In particular, the proposed electricity-aware heat market framework provides a trade-off between the sequential and fully integrated market frameworks by significantly reducing the inefficiencies in both heat and electricity systems while respecting the current sequence of clearing heat and electricity markets.