Energies, Vol. 15, Pages 7087: Economic Dispatch of Power Retailers: A Bi-Level Programming Approach via Market Clearing Price (Energies)

For power retailers in a smart grid, it is necessary to design an economic dispatch method to maintain a balance between power supply and demand on the sale side as well as obtain better economic benefits. This study concentrates on the economic dispatch of the dominant retailer in a regional market. The dominant retailer is considered to be equipped with generator resources such as distributed photovoltaics (PV), wind turbines (WT), and microturbines (MT). As one retailer cannot exactly predict the market conditions of other retailers, the retail market is considered to be modeled as a dichotomous-market model consisting of the dominant retailer market and the other retailers market. As a result, a bi-level optimal dispatch model is proposed for the dominant power retailer based on the dichotomous-market model. In the proposed model, the outer problem aims to minimize the costs of purchases under time-of-use (TOU) price given in the market clearing process, while the inner problem is formulated to simulate the process of market clearing. Furthermore, the bi-level model is converted to a single-level model via the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions and eventually solved by employing the YALMIP toolbox with Gurobi solver. Finally, a case study is conducted to validate the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed model, and the analysis of the variables is presented.