Integration of Price-Based Demand Response in DisCos' Short-Term Decision Model

Real-time electricity prices along with demand-side potentials can provide distribution companies (DisCos) with considerable financial and technical benefits compared to the conventional flat prices. This paper incorporates demand response in DisCos' short-term decision model in a real-time pricing (RTP) environment wherein consumers are charged based on hourly varying prices. Besides the hourly RTP sale prices, the established model deals with other DisCo's short-term activities including hourly purchases from the grid, commitment of distributed generation (DG) units, dispatch of shunt compensators, and invocation of load curtailments (LCs). The stochastic nature of wholesale market prices and customers load is also considered in the model. The model is a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem which can be easily solved via commercial software packages. The objective is to maximize the DisCo's expected profit while its revenue is limited by regulating bodies. A typical Finnish 20 kV urban distribution network is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the established model. Simulation results are presented and discussed to investigate the impacts on both financial and technical aspects of using of RTP sale prices.