The thesis consists of a collection of four papers on topics related to congestion management in electricity markets, preceded by a general review of approximations used in modeling power flows.

The first three papers address different methods for managing congestion in electricity markets, including different representations of network aggregation and demand elasticity, and different ways of handling security constraints. The analyses are conducted with a fundamental model of the Nordic power market that includes a detailed representation of technical and economic market characteristics.

The analyses are based on hourly scenarios constructed from actual market data. The fourth paper analyses the strategic behavior of a generator and its short run implications on market outcomes in an electricity network with transmission constraints. This is done on a small-size network model including the effects of loop flow.

The Norwegian electricity market reform was activated in 1991. The motivation was to achieve higher efficiency and cost reduction, and to avoid overinvestment. In the Nordic day-ahead electricity market zonal pricing is used for managing congestion. Because of several strained situations in the Nordic power system during 2009 and 2010, changes in the congestion management method have been considered by the Norwegian regulator. The research results in this thesis can be gathered under an umbrella goal of visualizing, explaining, and providing a model-based quantitative assessment of transmission limits, implications of congestion and congestion management in interconnected networks under perfect and imperfect competition.

One of the main conclusions is that the current congestion management method results in prices that do not reflect the true costs of transmission bottlenecks, and that in some cases system security has to be disregarded to achieve feasible prices. The results prove that better system utilization is possible without capacity expansion.

Prescribed topic for the trial lecture

"Counter-trading and other redispatch procedures in electricity markets".

Members of the evaluation committee

Chair: Assistant Professor Linda Rud, Director of Research Administration, NHH, Norway
Associate Professor Pär Holmberg, IFN, Sweden
Professor Asgeir Tomasgard, NTNU, Norway

Supervising committee

Professor Mette H. Bjørndal, Norwegian School of Economics, principal supervisor
Associate Professor Endre Bjørndal, Norwegian School of Economics
Professor Kurt Jörnsten, Norwegian School of Economics
Professor Sverre Storøy, University of Bergen

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