An Investigation on Electricity Business Perspectives in Southern Italy Area

The Italian electricity market organization is based on a compulsory power pool structure where all electricity buying and selling activities are under the market operators’ control. The Market Clearing Price is determined by the intersection of cumulative saleand purchase- curves. Many crucial aspects may influence the energy price giving rise to market inefficiencies. A typical market inefficiency is the congestion. The paper deals with a simulation tool able to investigate the wholesale energy market when network congestion arises. In this case, the market splitting process into two or more zones is required when the interface flow between neighboring zones exceeds the prefixed transfer limits. The proposed approach is applied to the entire Italian energy market focusing the analysis on the Southern Italy business perspectives. Test results show the effects on the energy price and profits of plant-outage, network configuration changes and of the increasing presence of combined power plants.