Grant: Engage Grants Program

In Saskatchewan, emissions, new technologies accessible to customers (such as energy storage, solar panelsand electric vehicles), and the need for the power system to be able to integrate variable energy (such as wind and solar) represent a major challenge for the design of the power system. Depending on the amount of variable energy required to be integrated, integration services, including instantaneous controllable load, storage and customers' electricity production, have a great potential to contribute to this challenge. The option for SaskPower (a public power utility) to launch an online auction to purchase integration services is a worthy research topic. Creating an auction for integration services will be substantially different and harder than has been utilized for the wholesale electricity markets. For our specific electricity market, we will develop a robust and efficient combinatorial reverse auction to be able to procure integration services from various sources.In the context of combinatorial auctions, the winner determination problem is difficult to address due to itscomputational complexity. Power suppliers compete on different bundles of integration services and this leadsto a complex winner determination problem. To meet this challenge, our ambition is to elaborate a winnerdetermination method based on parallel genetic algorithms in order to find the winners with the leastprocurement time and cost. The proposed electricity auction service, developed as a mobile and distributedapplication, will greatly benefit SaskPower and its ratepayers both environmentally and economically. Inaddition to augmenting the competition in the market, our electricity auction will significantly encourage theuse of diverse renewable energy technologies and the investment in potential new ones.