An ISO found that its market processes scheduled energy transactions and procured reserve capacity that frequently required manual intervention in the market so that procured reserve capacity could be deployed if a contingency occurred.

The need for manual intervention arose because the market systems did not model the interaction of the flows from the energy schedules and the flows that would be caused if reserve capacity were deployed for a modeled contingency.

We enhanced the Security Constrained Economic Dispatch (SCED) used in the ISO’s market to enable it to evaluate the interaction of scheduling energy and potentially deploying procured reserves for a contingency on the flows on transmission facilities.

The enhanced SCED was able to enforce flow limits on the transmission facilities caused by the energy transactions as well as flows caused by deploying reserve capacity for a contingency. The approach could be applied to any network topology.

The approach was implemented by the ISO and shown to increase reliability and to reduce costs.