Incorporating Price-Responsive Demand in Energy Scheduling Based on Consumer Payment Minimization

In the restructured power industry, demand responsiveness is a key factor whose importance will be boosted due to the impetus provided by the development of smart grids. Within the context of pool-based electricity markets, this paper addresses the incorporation of price-responsive demand in multiperiod energy scheduling driven by consumer payment minimization. Although consumer payment minimization has drawn considerable attention mainly in an operational setting and also recently under a planning framework, available models and solution approaches typically neglect demand-side participation. The proposed scheduling model considers a marginal pricing scheme as well as the effects of both network constraints and intertemporal constraints associated with generation operation. Modeling demand-side participation leads to bilinear payment terms that significantly increase the mathematical complexity of the optimization process. The resulting problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear bilevel program for which no exact solution technique is currently available. This paper presents a novel methodology by which the original bilevel and bilinear problem is converted into an equivalent single-level mixed-integer linear program suitable for efficient off-The-shelf software. This transformation is based on the application of duality theory of linear programming, integer algebra, and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions. The proposed approach has been successfully applied to the IEEE 118-bus system.