Dual-pricing policy for controller-side strategies in demand side management

Nowadays, smart grid is drawing great emphasis in the U.S., Europe and China with the increasing awareness of the notion - green world. A whole bunch of new smart grid related technologies and projects are booming throughout the world. These technologies fundamentally change the way how demand side management is done in the grid. In this paper, we propose a demand side management model, where appliances are categorized into non-interruptible tasks and interruptible tasks with parameters that are easy to implement in smart meters. Within our model, we adopt a pricing policy which leads to an optimal user-side strategy and analyze several strategies for the grid controller to set the future prices for the power grid in order to flatten the aggregated profile. A novel dual-pricing policy which sets different prices for different types of tasks is also proposed. Simulation results show that our designed mechanism can help reduce the peak-to-average ratio and coefficient of variation of the aggregated profile very well.