Impact of Strategic Behaviors of the Electricity Consumers on Power System Reliability

Over the past few decades, electricity markets have created competitive environments for the participation of different players. Electricity consumers (as end users in power systems) can behave strategically based on their purposes in the markets. Their behaviors induce more uncertainty into the power grid, due to their dynamic load demands. Hence, a power system operator faces more difficulties in maintaining an acceptable level of reliability and security in the system. On the other hand, the strategic behaviors of electricity consumers can be as a double-edged sword in the power grid. There is a group of consumers who are flexible and so can be interrupted at critical time periods and pursue their economic targets in the electricity markets. However, the second group is concerned with electricity demand being provided to them with the desired reliability level. Hence, the decisions of this group of electrical consumers are in conflict with their corresponding demand response programs. According to the above statement, this chapter aims at investigating the impact of strategic behavior of the electrical consumers on power system reliability. In this way, different agents of electricity markets are defined in this chapter which their behavior can impact the market-clearing problem. Energy and reserve are assumed as electricity commodities in this chapter. Thus, a two-stage, day-ahead and real-time, stochastic unit commitment problem is solved to clear energy and reserve simultaneously considering the uncertainty of wind power generations and conventional generation units which impacts the reliability of sustainable power systems.