Low-Carbon Economic Dispatch of Power Systems Considering Multi-Agent Game on Carbon Emission Utility

During the transformation of power systems toward a high proportion of renewable energy, thermal power units remain the core support for ensuring a stable power supply. Controlling carbon emissions and allocating resource utility are the keys to economic dispatch optimization. Most existing economic dispatch optimization models focus on cost and total carbon emission control, but ignore the utility balance of carbon emission resources among different units. Based on the envy-free fairness theory, this paper establishes an economic dispatch optimization model for thermal power-integrated power systems that considers the carbon emission utility game among multiple agents. By constructing a mixed-integer programming model that minimizes the mean absolute error, this study obtains a piecewise linear scheme for the power generation–coal consumption and carbon emission utility of thermal power units. The standard linear programming form of this scheme is also derived. Based on the principle of almost envy-free fair distribution, carbon emission utility game constraints are proposed. On this basis, combining the above models and constraints, an economic dispatch model aiming to minimize the total power generation cost of the system is proposed. Case study verification shows that the mean absolute error of the proposed linear fitting method is lower than that of existing methods. The economic dispatch optimization model ensures optimal cost while satisfying the source-load power balance. Meanwhile, with a slight increase in total power generation cost, the carbon emission utility balance of each unit is achieved, thereby promoting the fairness of carbon emission reduction responsibilities among multiple units.