AGC SIMULATOR FOR PRICE-BASED OPERATION .1. A MODEL

This is Part 1 of a two part paper dealing with automatic generation c ontrol in a deregulated electric industry. Through the passage of new public utility regulatory policies, the Federal Energy Regulatory Comm ission (FERC) encourages an open market system for price based operati on. Recently, the FERC has issued a notice of proposed rulemaking seek ing comments on various ancillary services. One of these ancillary ser vices is load following. This paper suggests the modifications require d in the conventional AGC software to prepare students to study load f ollowing in price-based market operation. The details of implementing an academic power system are used to highlight the differences between the AGC operation in a vertically integrated industry (conventional p aradigm) and a horizontally integrated industry (new paradigm). The fu ture business environment for electric utilities is incompletely defin ed as of this writing. Therefore, a framework for price-based operatio n is developed to assist students in understanding AGC implementation in the new market structure. The proposed market structure is kept gen eric enough to capture all possibilities in marketing load following c apability. Part II reports case study results of various load followin g contracts to illustrate the features of the proposed simulator model .