Abstract: Under the background of the electricity spot market, the pumped storage power stations are facing the challenges of how to operate to meet the demand of power systems with high-proportion renewable energy. To this end, this paper proposes the marketization operation mechanism that the capacity tariff of pumped storage power stations is preserved, and the pumped storage power stations act as the price recipients without price and capacity offer. Based on the above operation mechanism, the optimal clearing model of day-ahead markets embedding the participation of pumped storage power stations is further proposed. The rationality and feasibility of the proposed marketization operation mechanism and optimal clearing model of the pumped storage power stations are demonstrated by case study. The analysis results show that the proposed mechanism can solve the unreasonable operation problems of some pumped storage power stations.