Opportunities for Price Manipulation by Aggregators in Electricity Markets

Aggregators are playing an increasingly crucial role for integrating renewable generation into power systems. However, the intermittent nature of renewable generation makes market interactions of aggregators difficult to monitor and regulate, raising concerns about potential market manipulations. In this paper, we address this issue by quantifying the profit an aggregator can obtain through strategic curtailment of generation in an electricity market. We show that, while the problem of maximizing the benefit from curtailment is hard in general, efficient algorithms exist when the topology of the network is radial (acyclic). Further, we highlight that significant increases in profit can be obtained through strategic curtailment in practical settings.