On the Impact of Coal Supply Chain Disruption to the Electricity Market

Coal supply plays an essential role in the power systems, given the prevalence of coal-fired generation facilities. As a consequence, disruptions in the coal supply chain, possibly stemming from coal mine outages and transportation network interruptions, may strongly affect the operation of the electricity market. To address this issue, this paper proposes a two-stage simulation framework to assess the repercussions of coal supply chain disruptions on the electricity market. In the first stage, coal mining enterprises (CMEs) are modelled as competitive entities engaged in optimizing their strategies related to coal production, transportation, and sales. Variational inequality (VI) theory is employed to establish the existence and uniqueness of the generalized Nash equilibrium. Then, a decentralized projection-based algorithm is proposed based on the equivalently reformulated VI to identify the equilibrium in the coal supply chain. The second stage focuses on the electricity market clearing process, which hinges on the generation cost and the capacity of generation companies (GenCos). These attributes are influenced by the equilibrium state of the coal supply chain. The effectiveness of the proposed two-stage simulation framework in quantifying the impact of coal supply chain disruptions on the electricity market is substantiated through validation by an N-1 disruption simulation conducted on the test system.