A Phased Interprovincial and Provincial‐Level Coordination Towards China's National Unified Electricity Spot Market

This paper proposes a staged coordination framework for the interprovincial and provincial clearing of China's national unified electricity spot market. Considering the institutional characteristics of national grid planning and a multilevel market structure, the proposed framework evolves from nationally organised interprovincial clearing with provincial boundary exchange implementation to iterative interprovincial–provincial co‐optimisation based on a unified network model and consistent constraint formulations and ultimately to a nationwide integrated clearing regime. The intermediate and mature stages enable the economically meaningful decomposition of price separation into congestion and marginal loss components, improve the consistency of congestion revenue recovery and settlement and support the establishment of a unified marginal pricing mechanism. To ensure market feasibility and long‐term efficiency, the framework incorporates congestion management and risk‐hedging arrangements aimed at revenue adequacy and investment incentive compatibility. This study provides a systematic market design approach for coordinated clearing, transmission cost recovery and risk management in China's unified electricity spot market.