Toward electricity retail competition: Survey and case study on technical infrastructure for advanced electricity market system

The retail competition in electrical power industry may produce benefits in perspectives of both business and environment. Customers can obtain monetary benefits through competition among service providers and exploit diverse electric services which can be more enhanced with the retail competition. In addition, employing distributed/renewable energy generation units can be accelerated by the retail competition, which leads a way for green growth of our society. In order to construct a new retail competition model or reform an existing one, we should conduct substantial amount of decision-makings on distribution automation technologies under an open access paradigm to enable stable grid controls and operations, smart metering for distribution network operators, and information exchanges between service providers and customers. Besides, we should also address critical concerns about security and privacy issues in the retail competition model since personal electricity information is supposed to be exposed, exchanged and exploited by most functions of the retail competition market. In this paper, we present a number of business models and price models which are shared viewpoints of the participants when deploying a retail competition market. We then introduce and summarize the distribution automation standards, and the smart metering interface and relevant standards. Subsequently, we make rigorous analysis on security and privacy issues, and finally we provide an overview of the retail competition model and a number of related academic issues. We envision that this survey will provide an overview of the entire retail competition market and common techniques in smart grid system to researchers and guide them on their research and developments.