Stochastic electricity dispatch: A challenge for market design

While the stochastic market clearing gives a solution with a higher expected social welfare, it poses several challenges for market design. The stochastic dispatch may lead to a dispatch where the day-ahead prices deviate from the bid curves to the first market. This can lead to incentives for self-scheduling, in that it may require market participants to accept prices that deviate from the marginal costs or benefits corresponding to the scheduled quantities. Our analysis shows that the intermittent producer has an incentive to deviate from the system optimal plan in both the myopic and stochastic model, and this incentive is particularly strong under the myopic model. We also discuss how the expected social welfare of the market outcome under stochastic market clearing depends on the quality of the information that the system operator will base the market clearing on. In particular, we show that an intermittent producer may have an incentive to misreport the probability distribution for its generation.