Spot clearing in energy markets considering exercise of interruptible load options by retailers

The retail customers enjoy pre-agreed fixed price and quantity contracts, whereas the retailers ought to secure their energy at volatile spot market clearing conditions. This exposes the retailers to volatility of price and quantity. As one of the ways to mitigate such risks, the retailers secure interruptible load options from their customers. The goal of these options is to give the retailers the flexibility to buy at the spot conditions or to exercise their interruptible load options, whichever is favourable. This paper proposes a mathematical formulation for spot clearing mechanism in energy markets that considers the exercise of interruptible load options by retailers. Spot clearing is formulated as a quadratic programming problem that considers the generators supply bids, customers and retailers demand bids to the whole sale electricity market and retailer contracts and interruptible loads options in the retail market to determine the market clearing price and quantities of all the market players. The proposed formulation is analysed on a 3 bus, 6 bus and 46 bus test system.