In restructured electricity market, the consumers have various procurement strategies to supply their
electricity demand from alternative resources. An approach to cost reduction and risk management for
a large consumer is participation in demand response programs (DRP). Due to uncertain nature of pool
prices and price fluctuations in pool market, uncertainty modeling is inevitable. For evaluation of different
procurement strategies of large consumer, a technique based on information gap decision theory (IGDT)
is proposed. This paper develops an energy acquisition model for large consumer with multiple procurement options including distributed generation (DG), bilateral contracts and pool market purchase with
participating in DRP. This paper is focused to study the effect of DRP on the procurement strategy problem.
Also, the time-of-use (TOU) rates of demand response programs have been modeled and consequently
its influence on load profile and procurement strategy has been discussed. The proposed method does
not minimize the procurement cost, but allows deriving robust decision with respect to price volatility.
The robustness of procurement strategies for high procurement costs is optimized and related procurement strategy is proposed. The proposed method either deals with optimizing the opportunities to take
advantage from low procurement costs or low pool prices. Finally, a case study is studied to show the
advantages of proposed method.