Stability Analysis of Wholesale Electricity Markets under Dynamic Consumption Models and Real-Time Pricing

This paper analyzes stability conditions for wholesale electricity markets under real-time retail pricing and realistic consumption models with memory, which explicitly take into account previous electricity prices and consumption levels. By passing on the current retail price of electricity from supplier to consumer and feeding the observed consumption back to the supplier, a closed-loop dynamical system for electricity prices and consumption arises whose stability is to be investigated. Under mild assumptions on the generation cost of electricity and consumers' backlog disutility functions, we show that, for consumer models with price memory only, market stability is achieved if the ratio between the consumers' marginal backlog disutility and the suppliers' marginal cost of supply remains below a fixed threshold. Further, consumer models with price and consumption memory can result in greater stability regions and faster convergence to the equilibrium compared to models with price memory alone, if consumption deviations from nominal demand are adequately penalized.Comment: 8 pages, 7 Figures, accepted to the 2017 American Control Conferenc

Hedging strategies for load-serving entities in wholesale electricity markets

© 2017 IEEE. Load-serving entities which procure electricity from the wholesale electricity market to service end-users face significant quantity and price risks due to the volatile nature of electricity demand and quasi-fixed residential tariffs at which electricity is sold. This paper investigates strategies for load serving entities to hedge against such price risks. Specifically, we compute profit-maximizing portfolios of forward contract and call options as a function of uncertain aggregate user demand and wholesale electricity prices. We compare the profit to the case of Demand Response, where users are offered monetary incentives to temporarily reduce their consumption during periods of supply shortages. Using smart meter data of residential customers in California, we simulate optimal portfolios and derive conditions under which Demand Response outperforms call options and forward contracts. Our analysis suggests that Demand Response becomes more competitive as wholesale electricity prices increase

Eliciting private user information for residential demand response

Residential Demand Response has emerged as a viable tool to alleviate supply and demand imbalances of electricity during times when the electric grid is strained. Demand Response providers bid reduction capacity into the wholesale electricity market by asking customers to temporarily reduce consumption in exchange for a monetary incentive. This paper models consumer behavior in response to such incentives by formulating Demand Response in a Mechanism Design framework. In this auction setting, the Demand Response Provider collects price elasticities as bids from its rational, profit-maximizing customers, which allows targeting only the users most susceptible to incentives such that an aggregate reduction target is reached in expectation. We measure reductions by comparing the materialized consumption to the projected consumption, which we model as the '10-in-10'-baseline used by the California Independent System Operator. Due to the suboptimal performance of this baseline, we show, using consumption data of residential customers in California, that Demand Response Providers receive payments for 'virtual reductions', which exist due to the inaccuracies of the baseline rather than actual reductions. Improving the accuracy of the baseline diminishes the contribution of these virtual reductions. Keywords: Load management; Electricity supply industry; Aggregates; Contracts; Elasticity; Building

How peer effects influence energy consumption

This paper analyzes the impact of peer effects on electricity consumption of a network of rational, utility-maximizing users. Users derive utility from consuming electricity as well as consuming less energy than their neighbors. However, a disutility is incurred for consuming more than their neighbors. To maximize the profit of the load-serving entity that provides electricity to such users, we develop a two-stage game-theoretic model, where the entity sets the prices in the first stage. In the second stage, consumers decide on their demand in response to the observed price set in the first stage so as to maximize their utility. To this end, we derive theoretical statements under which such peer effects reduce aggregate user consumption. Further, we obtain expressions for the resulting electricity consumption and profit of the load serving entity for the case of perfect price discrimination and a single price under complete information, and approximations under incomplete information. Simulations suggest that exposing only a selected subset of all users to peer effects maximizes the entity's profit