Abstract
Although price responsive demand response has been widely accepted
as playing an important role in the reliable and economic operation of power
system, the real response from demand side can be highly uncertain
due to limited understanding of consumers\textquoteright{} response
to pricing signals. To model the behavior of consumers, the price
elasticity of demand has been explored and utilized in both research
and real practice. However, the price elasticity of demand is not
precisely known and may vary greatly with operating conditions and
types of customers. To accommodate the uncertainty of demand response,
alternative unit commitment methods robust to the uncertainty of the
demand response require investigation. In this paper, a robust
unit commitment model to minimize the generalized social cost is proposed
for the optimal unit commitment decision taking into account
uncertainty of the price elasticity of demand. By optimizing the worst
case under proper robust level, the unit commitment solution of the proposed model is robust
against all possible realizations of the modeled uncertain demand
response. Numerical simulations on the IEEE Reliability Test System
show the effectiveness of the method. Compared to unit
commitment with deterministic price elasticity of demand, the proposed
robust model can reduce the average Locational Marginal Prices (LMPs)
as well as the price volatility.
