Simulating active and reactive energy markets

The aim of this paper is to present our initial efforts on understanding, mainly through models and simulations, the practical interactions between reactive and active energy markets in a power grid. The reactive power markets, regardless the obvious importance, have not received significant research and development attention so far. Recent studies concern the characteristics of such markets focusing almost exclusively on the producers' viewpoint. In this paper we propose to study the effect of reactive power at the consumer side and the price that has to pay. Experiments exhibiting the interaction of the reactive and active energy markets are presented and analyzed through a simple IEEE bus configuration and a case study of a power grid with a total of approximately 30000 households with varying energy requirements and distributed energy producers.