Scenario-based Economic Dispatch with Uncertain Demand Response

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.