A Development of an Equilibrium Analysis Model between Electricity Retailers under Competitive Environment

Abstract

This paper provides a novel equilibrium model for analyzing behaviors of the electric retailers under competitive environment. In the deregulated electricity retail market, the retailers purchase the electricity power and sells it to consumers at the competitive prices. According to their risk attitudes, the retailers optimize the selling prices and the purchase allocation between a day-ahead market and forward contracts. Without the regulation, an equilibrium by those selfish decision making processes of multiple retailers would cause an adverse impact on the electricity market and also the power system. From stable and economical viewpoints, it is important to analyze the unfavorable equilibrium. The selfish behaviors of retailers are modeled as an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints in this paper and formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem to obtain a generalized Nash equilibrium by commercial solvers efficiently. Through computational examples, the proposed model and formulation are validated.