Contribution of emergency demand response programs in power system reliability

Nowadays, demand response has become one of the essential components of recent deregulated power systems as it can offer many distinguished features, such as availability, quickness, and applicability. DRPs (Demand response programs), announced by the federal energy regulatory commission, are among the most accepted and practical features of demand side management. DRPs not only can contribute in mitigating the intermittent effects of renewable energy resources but also can be used either to lower high energy prices, occurred in wholesale electricity markets, or when the security of power systems is at risk. In this paper, the influence of emergency demand response programs in improving reliability in case of failure of generation units is investigated. In the proposed reliability based optimization approach, the generation failure is modeled based on its forced outage rate. The proposed method can help independent system operators to schedule day-ahead generating units in a more reliable manner and can facilitate the participation of consumers to increase the total social welfare in the case of an emergency. Moreover, the mixed integer programming formulation allows implementing the proposed method by using available tractable linear solvers. Eventually, the applicability of the proposed model is tested on the IEEE 24-bus reliability test system and its effects on the value of lost load and the expected load not served are discussed. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.