Market-Oriented Power Balancing Mechanisms and Methods for New-Type Power Systems: A Special Issue Overview
The deep advancement of carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals has accelerated the construction of new-type power systems, with the installed capacity share of renewable energy approaching half and its electricity generation share rapidly increasing. However, the randomness, intermittency, and volatility of renewable energy output challenge the balancing of supply and demand, necessitating additional regulation resources. Concurrently, advances in communication, control, and artificial intelligence have enabled new regulation entities such as electrochemical energy storage, compressed air energy storage, and concentrating solar power, while the marginal cost of load-side balancing services declines, fostering the rapid development of virtual power plants and flexibility retrofits of conventional power. Accurately evaluating the value of regulation services and providing reasonable compensation are fundamental to incentivizing participation and investment. Yet, current power balancing mechanisms and market models do not fully reflect the true value of these flexible resources, and technical barriers and costs remain high for distributed resources. In 2025, China preliminarily established a unified national electricity market, covering the entire energy market, and attention has turned to valuing regulation services. This special issue, organized by the editorial board of Automation of Electric Power Systems, compiles 14 papers addressing market-oriented balancing mechanisms, capacity adequacy, cost compensation, flexible resource participation, and market applications. Key contributions include a market-oriented regulation responsibility system with 'substitute quantity' and 'regulation quantity' markets, hierarchical coordination mechanisms, capacity adequacy frameworks, cost compensation mechanisms using deep reinforcement learning, inertia pricing, and trading strategies for electric vehicles and building aggregators. Provincial market designs from Guangdong and Gansu provide practical templates. The issue aims to provide theoretical and practical support for market innovation and the construction of new-type power systems and the unified national market.