Modeling and Simulation of Electricity Retail Market with Oligopolistic Equilibrium Method

Establishing a competitive and efficient electricity retail market is a crucial task of the power system restructuring around the world. As most retailers have not yet entered the stage of practical selling and competition in the electricity retail market of a certain region, the retail market is akin to an oligopolistic market. To analyze the strategic bidding behaviors in the oligopolistic retail market, the Bertrand-based oligopolistic equilibrium model is built, in which the market share function is adopted to describe the relationship between the retail load and retail price, as well as differences in reputation among retailers. With the presence of a certain contract trading, bidding strategies of retailers in the retail market are studied. Then, the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium are proved. In addition, impacts of retailer's contract volume on market equilibrium outcomes are theoretically analyzed. Finally, the effectiveness of the theoretical analysis is verified by numerical examples. It is shown that the retailer's market power can be mitigated by the contract trading with consumers, which contributes to improving the efficiency of the electricity retail market.