Effects of Interruptible Load on Decision Making of a Distribution Company in Competitive Environments

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to present a new day-ahead energy acquisition model for a distribution company (Disco) in a competitive electricity market environment with Interruptible Load (IL). The work formulates the Disco energy acquisition model as a bi-level optimization problem with some of real issues, and then studies and designs a Genetic Algorithm (GA) of this optimization problem too. To achieve this goal, a novel two-step procedure is proposed. At the first step, a realistic model for an industrial interruptible load is introduced, and it is shown that Interruptible load model may affect the problem modeling and solving. At the second step, Disco energy acquisition program is formulated and solved with this realistic model. As a result, this paper shows energy acquisition programming model with ILs, by considering real assumptions. The introduced method shows a good performance of problem modeling and solving algorithm both in terms of solution quality and computational results. In addition, a case study is carried out considering a test system with some assumptions. Subsequently results show the general applicability of the proposed model with potential cost saving for the Disco.