Impact of intentional islanding of distributed generation on electricity market prices

The battle for electricity customers in an increasingly competitive and deregulated market environment is one of the challenges facing the electric power utilities of today. Customers expect a reliable and efficient supply of power from their utilities. One of the advantages that a distributed generator (DG) can provide to the electric utility and to customers is the possibility of improving the continuity of supply by implementing safe intentional islands in the event of upstream utility supply outage. Implementing intentional islanding of DG in a deregulated era will have an impact on electricity market prices. This problem is considered in this paper by solving the optimal power flow problem while accounting for islanded operation.