In provincial electricity markets where long-term contracts and spot trading coexist, multiple categories of imbalance funds arise from congestion, energy deviations and dual-track price differences, posing challenges to energy management systems (EMS) in terms of fair and robust settlement. This paper proposes an EMS-oriented framework to assess and diagnose alternative imbalance settlement mechanisms in a provincial dual-track market. First, a unified settlement model is developed that reconstructs key imbalance fund categories and allocates them to heterogeneous agents—thermal, renewable and storage units and different user groups—under a library of settlement rules. Second, a multi-scenario simulation platform is built, covering normal operation, tight supply and high-renewable-volatility conditions. Third, a multi-criteria evaluation scheme is designed to quantify economic efficiency, fairness, risk and renewable support for each mechanism–scenario combination. Finally, a category–agent two-dimensional diagnostic module is introduced to reveal misallocation patterns and the main money-transfer paths among fund categories and agent groups. A case study on a realistic provincial system shows that the proposed framework can distinguish mechanisms with better overall robustness, identify severe cross-subsidies in extreme scenarios and provide practical guidance for refining imbalance settlement parameters within EMS-driven market operations.
Wang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.