This paper introduces a new computational framework to account for
uncertainties in day-ahead electricity market clearing process in the presence
of demand response providers. A central challenge when dealing with many demand
response providers is the uncertainty of its realization. In this paper, a new
economic dispatch framework that is based on the recent theoretical development
of the scenario approach is introduced. By removing samples from a finite
uncertainty set, this approach improves dispatch performance while guaranteeing
a quantifiable risk level with respect to the probability of violating the
constraints. The theoretical bound on the level of risk is shown to be a
function of the number of scenarios removed. This is appealing to the system
operator for the following reasons: (1) the improvement of performance comes at
the cost of a quantifiable level of violation probability in the constraints;
(2) the violation upper bound does not depend on the probability distribution
assumption of the uncertainty in demand response. Numerical simulations on (1)
3-bus and (2) IEEE 14-bus system (3) IEEE 118-bus system suggest that this
approach could be a promising alternative in future electricity markets with
multiple demand response providers