Decision-making Model for Integrated Energy Service Provider Considering Multi-energy Consumers’ Demand Response

Abstract

With rapid development of multi-energy complementarity technologies, integrated energy service has gained increasing attentions and integrated energy service providers (IESPs) will become active trading entities in energy markets. To examine the impacts of multi-energy consumers’ demand response (DR) on IESPs’ trading strategies, this paper proposes a bi-level decision-making framework for an IESP to provide electricity and natural gas services for consumers taking into account uncertainties in wholesale electricity market prices. In the upper-level model, the IESP maximizes its conditional robust profit under a given confidence level, and determines energy procurement strategy and DR incentives to consumers. The DR incentives include the compensation prices for consumers’ load shift and the dynamic retail prices. In the lower-level model, according to the DR incentives, each consumer makes DR decisions including both electricity load shift from peak time to valley time and electricity load shift to gas load, to minimize its comprehensive cost including the discomfort of energy use. Numerical examples are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. It is shown that by making full utilization of the multi-energy consumers’ DR capability, the IESP can achieve greater profitability in energy trading and reduce risk caused by uncertainties in wholesale prices.