Assessing the Influence of Power Pools on Emission Constrained Economic Dispatch

Power pools are formal groups of utilities that exchange electricity in order to reduce production costs. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework which assesses the impacts of different types of pooling arrangements on production costs and emissions. The framework is based on a set of economic dispatch models which simulate how different types of pools approach short-term energy exchanges. The models include constraints on emissions, system demand, spinning reserve and unit output. By varying the constraint set, trade-offs between costs and emissions across different types of pools can be quantified. To demonstrate the value of this approach, an illustrative calculation is presented for an existing pool.