Abstract
Successful privatization in other sectors leads to a restructuring in the power sector. The same practice has been adopted in the electrical industry with a deregulated electricity market (EM). This enables competition among generating companies (Genco's) for maximizing their profit and it plays a central role. With this aim, each Genco gives a higher bid that may result in a risk of losing the opportunity to get selected at auction. The big challenge in front of a Genco is to acquire an optimal bid and this process is known as the Optimal Bidding Strategy (OBS) of a Genco. In this manuscript, a new variant of whale optimization (WOA) termed the Amended Whale Optimization Algorithm (AWOA) is proposed, to attain the OBS of thermal Genco in an EM. Once the effectiveness of new AWOA is proved on 23 benchmark functions, it is applied to five Genco strategic bidding problems in a spot market with uniform price. The results obtained from the proposed AWOA are compared with other competitive algorithms. The results reflect that AWOA outperforms in terms of the profit and convergence rate. Simulations also indicate that the proposed AWOA can successfully be used for an OBS in the EM.