Power Reliability Service Provision and Pricing in Distribution Power Network

For distribution utilities, it is important to match the power reliability service with the demand of users. However, since there are partial overlaps in the power supply paths of different nodes, the reliability of different nodes has the inherent coupling relation based on the network topology. The improvement of reliability level on individual nodes can hardly be separately controlled without causing any influence on other nodes. To solve this problem, this paper aims to study the co-optimization method of reliability service provision and pricing for the distribution utility. First, a joint placement method of common devices for reliability enhancement is presented. The coupling relationship between the load recovery states of different load nodes under the same fault is conveniently expressed. Second, a service menu design approach is introduced to determine the level and price of candidate reliability services. It considers that users have differentiated evaluations of service and select the service in the menu according to their profit maximization. Third, to overcome the free-riding issue that users receive unnecessarily high-reliability service, the load-shedding compensation method is proposed to exactly match the reliability level received by users to the service level selected by users. After the model transformation, the optimization model is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem. An acceleration algorithm with convergence guarantee is developed to mitigate the computational burden.