Three Essays on Decision Making under Uncertainty in Electric Power Systems

This thesis consists of three essays, discussing three different but connected problems on decision making under uncertainty in electricpower systems.The first essay uses a system model to examine how various factors affect the market price of electricity, and decomposes the price toquantitatively evaluate the contributions of individual factors as well as their interactions. Sensitivity analysis results from a parametric quadratic program are applied in the computation.The second essay formulates the well studied security constrained economic dispatch (SCED) problem as a Markov decision process model,where the action space is a polyhedron defined by linear generation and transmission constraints. Such a model enables the decision maker to accurately evaluate the impact of a dispatch decision to the entire future operation of the electric power system.The third essay examines the effect of demand and supply side uncertainties on the exercise of market power. Solutions under Bertrand, Cournot, and linear supply function equilibrium (LSFE)models are derived and compared.The three problems studied in the essays are a unique representation of different levels of the decision making process in a sophisticated deregulated electric power system, using techniques from both mathematical programming and probability/statistics.