A new demand response scheme for electricity retailers

A new demand response (DR) scheme from the retailers' point of view is presented in this paper. The proposed DR scheme allows a retailer to decide how to buy DR from aggregators and consumers. Various long-term and real-time DR agreements are proposed, where they are considered as energy resources of retailers in addition to the commonly used providers. These innovative agreements include pool-order options, spike-order options, forward DR contracts and reward-based DR. A stochastic energy procurement problem for retailers is formulated, in which pool prices and customers' participation in the reward-based DR are uncertain variables. The feasibility of the problem is assessed using a realistic case of the Queensland jurisdiction within the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM). The outcomes indicate the usefulness of the given DR scheme for retailers, particularly for the conservative ones. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.