Towards a fully integrated market for demand response, energy and reserves

There is a trend for demand response (DR) market as a dedicated competitive environment for trading DR. In this market, aggregators participate as DR providers, while system operator, retailers and distributors are the DR buyers. Scheduling DR through the DR markets leads to a fair allocation of the benefits and payments across all participants. However, the integration of the DR markets into the existing power markets leads to technical and economic challenges. Those challenges associated with the integration of the DR markets into the energy/reserve markets are addressed in this study. To clear the DR markets jointly with the energy/reserve market, a bilevel approach is proposed in which the upper level belongs to energy/reserve market problem and the lower level includes DR market clearance. The proposed bilevel programming problem is then recast as a mixed-integer linear programming problem which can be solved using commercially available software. Finally, numerical results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach, demonstrating it brings about lower reserve price and higher social welfare compared with the existing markets.