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R. Saur

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4 records found

Conference paper (2024) - R. Saur, J.A. la Poutré, N. Yorke-Smith
Accurate predictions of power fluctuations are pivotal to the operation of flexibility markets. While the design of flexibility markets is an active and ongoing field of research, the question of how to elicit high quality predictions in a non-cooperative setting is often overlooked. Conceptually, we contribute the concept of best prediction incentivizing contracts. Under such contracts the best response of an agent is to report the true distribution of its power fluctuation. This concept differs from Incentive Compatibility by explicitly taking epistemic uncertainty into account: while Incentive Compatible mechanisms often assume the agent possess perfect knowledge of their own valuation, our concept incentivizes agents to reduce their epistemic uncertainty about the world. In practical terms, we present generic closed form solutions for polynomial distributions and show they can be used to approximate realistic Gaussian distributions. Lastly, placing our work in a larger context, we show that third party agents can profit from providing improved predictions via arbitrage. ...
Journal article (2023) - Roland Saur, Han La Poutré, Neil Yorke-Smith
The adoption of new market mechanisms - vital to the better integration of flexible assets - depends on the fairness and nondiscrimination of the pricing rules. We consider a market setting with time-flexible unit energy buyers and sellers, that additionally submit their availability in time. The time-flexibility of the agents allows for different schedules to be equivalent with regard to social welfare, which can lead to arbitrary price differences, i.e. price discrimination. In this work, we demonstrate that non-discriminatory prices are not trivially defined in time-flexible settings, provide a definition of non-discrimination as consistent over equivalent outcomes, show that this concept does not conflict with individual rationality and, finally, compare our work to broader concepts of fairness from economic psychology. ...
Conference paper (2020) - Roland Saur, Han la Poutré, Neil Yorke-Smith
Increasing electricity production from renewable energy sources has, by its fluctuating nature, created the need for more flexible demand side management. How to integrate flexible demand in the electricity system is an open research question. We consider the case of procuring the energy needs of a time-shiftable load through a set of simultaneous second price auctions. We derive a required condition for optimal bidding strategies. We then show the following results and bidding strategies under different market assumptions. For identical uniform auctions and multiple units of demand, we show that the global optimal strategy is to bid uniformly across all auctions. For non-identical auctions and multiple units, we provide a way to find solutions through a recursive approach and a non-linear solver. We show that our approach outperforms the literature under higher uncertainty conditions. ...
Conference paper (2019) - Roland Saur, Neil Yorke-Smith, Han La Poutré
In order to reduce CO2 emissions, energy systems using different energy carriers (e.g., heat and power) are becoming more intertwined and integrated. However, coordination between non-cooperative participants of these systems in the combined heat and power domain has been limited to single-sided auctions with one centralised seller. In this paper, we present a double-sided auction mechanism in which prosumers as well as consumers and producers of heat and power can participate. By showing that our mechanism is Incentive Compatible and Individually Rational, we ensure that truthful bidding is the optimal strategy, simplifying the bidding process and thus accommodating agents with limited computational resources. Finally, we show that our mechanism is fiscally sustainable, i.e., Weakly Budget Balanced. ...