Exploring the trade-off between competing objectives for electricity energy retailers through a novel multi-objective framework

Energy retailer is the intermediary between Generation Companies and consumers. In the medium time horizon, in order to gain market share, he has to minimize his selling price while looking at the profit, which is dependent on the revenues from selling and the costs to buy energy from forward contracts and participation in the market pool. In this paper, the two competing objectives are engaged proposing a new multi-objective framework in which a ε-constraint mathematical technique is used to produce the Pareto front (set of optimal solutions). The stochasticity of energy prices in the market and customer load demand are coped with the Lattice Monte Carlo Simulation (LMCS) and the method of the roulette wheel, which allow the stochastic multi-objective problem to be turned into a set of deterministic equivalents. The method performance is tested into some case studies.