Decision-making behavior of large power users under different warrant product combinations: a system dynamics analysis

To promote renewable energy consumption and the low-carbon energy transition, China started to implement the renewable energy consumption guarantee mechanism (new RPS) in 2019. However, at the early stage of policy implementation, the instability of market development and the uncertainty of the behavior of trading entities affected the pace of energy structure transformation to some extent. In this paper, against the background of the introduction of the renewable energy consumption guarantee mechanism, power generation enterprises and large power users are taken as the main research subjects. Considering the interactions among the traditional energy generation market, the green power market, the green certificate market and the excess consumption market, a system dynamics (SD) model is constructed considering the bilateral game. The simulation simulates the changes in product price, trading volume and cost in different warrant product portfolio strategies and clarifies the different warrant product mixtures of large consumers when purchasing electricity under multiple markets and multiple products. The results show that large users should fully consider the match between the product supply in the market and the actual demand of users. To reduce the total transaction cost of large users, the product portfolio strategy with fewer types of traded products should be prioritized. When large users face three kinds of warrant products, such as green certificates (TGC), consumption volume and CCER, the purchase portfolio is guaranteed to choose either one or the other. This study can provide a decision-making reference for the trading of warrant products and the optimization of a power purchase strategy for large users’ direct power purchases.