Temporally consistent tri ledger settlement enables robust and noncontestable coordination in interprovincial power systems

Inter-provincial electricity transactions within China’s unified power market are complicated by spatial heterogeneity, asynchronous dispatch timelines, and strategic deviations in bilateral commitments. Existing mechanisms often struggle with ex-post contestability, temporal inconsistencies, and poor alignment between real-time system conditions and deviation pricing, undermining the market’s fairness and reliability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel Tri-Ledger Coordinated Settlement (TCS) framework with built-in temporal consistency. The tri-ledger design consists of (1) a Contract Ledger capturing day-ahead bilateral schedules, (2) a Dispatch Ledger reflecting system-level nodal redispatch outcomes, and (3) a Deviation Ledger reconciling discrepancies across provinces through an enforceable and tamper-resistant protocol. Central to this framework is a Distributionally Robust Deviation Pricing (DRDP) model, which penalizes deviation behaviors not based on deterministic thresholds but through ambiguity-aware dual pricing anchored in Wasserstein-ball uncertainty sets. This allows the pricing system to anticipate manipulative strategies while offering probabilistic fairness to genuine imbalances caused by renewables or congestion. Furthermore, a Non-Contestable Decoupled Execution Mechanism (NCDEM) is developed to isolate provincial profit zones during redispatch operations, ensuring that a province cannot benefit by manipulating its declared bilateral trades or influencing others’ deviation compensations. The proposed approach guarantees strategy-proofness under minimal information assumptions and supports distributed execution by provincial grid companies without centralized re-optimization. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated on a stylized multi-province testbed derived from China’s Eastern and Central grid clusters. Numerical experiments show that the DRDP-based settlement leads to over 18.4% improvement in fairness-adjusted social welfare and reduces strategic deviation incentives by up to 73% compared to deterministic baseline models. Sensitivity analyses validate robustness under multiple load and RES penetration scenarios. The proposed TCS framework offers policy-relevant insights for implementing transparent and resilient provincial electricity market settlements under China’s “dual-track” trading architecture.