The deregulation of the electricity industry has introduced many opportunities as well as challenges to the once monopolised industry. This recent reform towards a competitive electricity industry advocates a need for charging energy losses to market participants through a more satisfactory and transparent mechanism. Market participants, whether they are generators or consumers, would want a loss allocation scheme that is able to reflect each market participants' contribution of generation or usage in the network. However, as electricity is an indistinguishable entity, there is no accurate method to trace the flow of electricity thus far. Hence, the issue of power loss allocation within the deregulated market still remains an unresolved setback to progress to a fully competitive electricity market. Many loss allocation methods have been introduced, however, none have been universally accepted. This thesis investigates existing power flow tracing and loss allocation methods in order to critically analyse the advantages and disadvantages of each method. They include loss allocation methods currently employed in Australias National Electricity Market (NEM) and Great Britain Market, as well as a selection of better known loss allocation methods that are introduced in the academic research field. Understanding of these methods makes it easier to choose a method that is more suitable for each electricity market. Many researchers believe that a resolution is through a fair and equitable allocation of losses. However, the definition of fair and equitable varies from one literature to another. In general, a fair and equitable loss allocation method should meet electrical laws as well as economical laws. This is because market driven transactions have become the new independent decision variables that define the behaviour of electric power systems. This definition is then used as the basis to assess the results obtained from the implementation of each existing method analysed. It was found that a key limitation of existing methods is the lack of a method that is able to trace the usage allocation of each generator to each load in an electrically justifiable manner. Any improvement to existing loss allocation methods should address this limitation. Thus, the main objective of this thesis is to present two transaction based methods that have been developed and tested by the author of this thesis. Fundamentally, both methods hold the capability to analyse losses involved in the transfer of power from one point of the network to another point. The first investigated method is based on the network reduction method, where a system is reduced to the nodes of interest. The second method is based on the loop frame of reference. Instead of representing the network flows through the commonly accepted nodal frame of reference, power flows within the network are instead expressed as the sum of power flows around loops that links loads to active sources. This provides the loop-based method with an advantage in which it allows the power requirements of a load to be viewed as emanating from an active source and also the advantage of assessing the viability of contract agreements within a hybrid market model. The final objective of this thesis is to analytically compare selected existing loss allocation schemes with the proposed loop-based method. As there are no standard means of judging the accuracy of any loss allocation methods, the author of this thesis proposed a different way to distinguish different loss allocation methods. That is, through the type of competition that each method promotes. A wide range of results is obtained in which the loss allocations of some methods are dependent only on the real power injection at each bus. On the other hand, the loss allocations of other methods such as the loop-based method are dependent on network operation efficiency. The comprehension of the different type of competitions each method promotes aims to assist market regulators in recognising the feasibility of employing each loss allocation method.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/252957 |
| Creators | Lim, Valerie Shia Chin |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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