Competitive Equilibrium for Electricity Markets with Spatially Flexible Loads

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized competitive equilibrium framework for electricity markets with spatially flexible loads like EV charging and datacenters, capturing their complex interactions with power prices and infrastructure.

Contribution

It establishes conditions for the existence, uniqueness, and efficiency of GCE in interconnected power, transportation, and datacenter networks, extending traditional market models.

Findings

GCE preserves key properties of CE under certain conditions.

Case studies demonstrate mutual influences among grid, transportation, and datacenter systems.

Framework applicable to multiple coupled flexible load systems.

Abstract

Electric vehicle charging and geo-distributed datacenters introduce spatially flexible loads (FLs) that couple power, transportation, and datacenter networks. These couplings create a closed-loop feedback between locational marginal prices (LMPs) and decisions of the FL systems, challenging the foundations of conventional competitive equilibrium (CE) in electricity markets. This paper studies a notion of generalized competitive equilibrium (GCE) that aims to capture such price-demand interactions across the interconnected infrastructures. We establish structural conditions under which the GCE preserves key properties of the conventional CE, including existence, uniqueness, and efficiency, without requiring detailed knowledge of decision processes for individual FL systems. The framework generalizes to settings where the grid is coupled with multiple FL systems. Stylized examples and case studies on the New York ISO grid, coupled with the Sioux Falls transportation and distributed datacenter networks, demonstrate the use of our theoretical framework and illustrate the mutual influence among the grid and the studied FL systems.