The rapid development of carbon capture technology speeds up its industrialization and wide application with the help of massive investment. In addition to the capital market, such investment may also come from a well-designed carbon market. This paper proposes a green certificate auction to maximize the auction revenue for enabling the carbon capture technology. Besides political and regulatory requirements, the goodwill from contributing to carbon neutrality may also incentivize the generating companies to participate. The auction design is challenging as it associates with the economic dispatch procedure in the electricity market. Using the notion of virtual demand, we decouple the auction from economic dispatch, and we prove that our designed auction enjoys optimality, truthfulness, and individual rationality. We also show that our auction can be extended to the multi-period scenario, highlighting the impact of leftover certificates. We further provide an upper bound for sample complexity when the willingness of participants cannot be well-identified. Numerical studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed auction and the tightness of the derived sample complexity bound.
CCS CONCEPTS• Applied computing → Multi-criterion optimization and decisionmaking.