Sharif Digital Repository

Time-varying electricity rates enable demand-side potentials, which provide an opportunity for distribution companies (DisCos) to hedge against the financial risk imposed by volatile spot market prices and uncertain customers' load. In particular, time-varying rates can be effective alternatives for at least a portion of costly forward contracts. This paper establishes a stochastic framework to determine optimal forward market purchases under time-varying rates. Various electricity rating strategies with different time intervals covering flat, time-of-use, and real-time pricing schemes are considered. The objective of the framework is to maximize DisCo's expected profit while the exposure... 

Time varying prices by motivating customers to reduce their consumption in peak periods propel the electricity industry towards a higher efficiency compared to that of common flat prices. Focusing on time-of-use (TOU) sale prices, this paper establishes a stochastic model for the medium-term decision making problem faced by a distribution company (DisCo). The developed model deals with the DisCo's decisions on the level of involvement in forward contracts and in the pool as well as the sale prices offered to customers. The demand response to TOU prices is captured using a price elasticity matrix (PEM). The objective is to maximize the DisCo's profit while the exposure risk imposed by... 

In a medium term planning horizon, a retailer should determine its forward contracting and pool participating strategies as well as the selling price to be offered to the customers. Considering a competitive retail electricity market, the number of clients being supplied by any retailer is a function of the selling prices and some other characteristics of all the retailers. This paper presents an equilibrium problem formulation to model the retailer's medium term decision making problem considering the strategy of other retailers. Decision making of any single retailer is formulated as a risk constraint stochastic programming problem. Uncertainty of pool prices and clients' demands is... 

This paper presents a risk-constrained programming approach to solve a retailer's medium-term planning problem. A retailer tries to maximize its profit via determining the optimal price offered to the customers as well as optimal strategy of participating in futures and pool markets. The uncertainty of pool prices is modeled by an envelope-bound information-gap model. Another source of uncertainty in this problem is the clients' demand, which is considered via a scenario generation method. The proposed method is formulated as a bi-level stochastic programming problem based on the information-gap decision theory. The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions are used to convert the bi-level...