A new demand response scheme for electricity retailers

Abstract A new demand response (DR) scheme from the retailers’ point of view is presented in this paper. The proposed DR scheme allows a retailer to decide how to buy DR from aggregators and consumers. Various long-term and real-time DR agreements are proposed, where they are considered as energy resources of retailers in addition to the commonly used providers. These innovative agreements include pool-order options, spike-order options, forward DR contracts and reward-based DR. A stochastic energy procurement problem for retailers is formulated, in which pool prices and customers’ participation in the reward-based DR are uncertain variables. The feasibility of the problem is assessed using a realistic case of the Queensland jurisdiction within the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM). The outcomes indicate the usefulness of the given DR scheme for retailers, particularly for the conservative ones.