The University of British Columbia

The authors present a model to evaluate electricity supply contracts for retail consumers who have a choice of retail offers under a recently deregulated environment. A bilateral contract to supply power at a fixed price will be attractive to some consumers, because the spot price in a power exchange market may go up unreasonably. In this approach, uncertain market prices are first estimated by an extended time-series model that considers the possible ranges of prices. Next, an index is introduced to reflect the consumer's preference for a low price with some margins. The differences in the offered price for a supply contract and the market price estimates are then compared with the preference index. The overall grade of matching the price differential and the consumer's preference indicates the degree of consumer satisfaction by the offered price for the transaction. Numerical examples using California Power Exchange data are illustrated