Reliability service-based strategies for improving electricity retailer competitiveness using a novel heuristic algorithm

Abstract

Liberalizing China's electricity sales market has led to fierce competition among electricity retailers. Providing customized electricity sales services is beneficial for electricity retailers to capture market share and gain a competitive edge. Therefore, a reliability service-based strategy is proposed to improve the electricity retailer competitiveness, which attracts industrial users by providing a continuous electricity supply. Specifically, the electricity retailer designs an electricity price package based on supply service reliability and a compensation model to cope with supply interruptions, considering the incremental cost approach and industrial users' different reliability needs. In addition, a user power shift model is constructed to evaluate user satisfaction, including electricity consumption, electricity cost, and reliability satisfaction. Furthermore, a decision-making optimization model for electricity retailers is formulated to maximize competitiveness and solved by the Growth Optimizer (GO). Experiments based on power grid company show that the proposed model can effectively improve the competitiveness of electricity retailers. Comparison with other heuristic algorithms also proves the superiority of the GO algorithm in terms of solution speed and quality.