User-centric demand response management in the smart grid with multiple providers

The smart grid is the next generation power grid with bidirectional communications between the electricity users and the providers. Demand response management is vital in the smart grid to reduce power generation costs as well as to lower the users' electricity bills. In this paper, we introduce multiple fossil-fuel and multiple renewable energy sources-based utility companies on the supply side, and propose an end-user oriented utility company selection scheme to minimize user costs. We formulate the problem as a game, incorporating the uncertainty associated with the power supply of the renewable sources, and prove that there exists a Nash equilibrium for the game. To further reduce users' costs, we develop a joint scheme by integrating shiftable load scheduling with utility company selection. We model the joint scheme also as a game, and prove the existence of a Nash equilibrium for the game. For both schemes, we propose distributed algorithms for the users to find the equilibrium of the game using only local information. We evaluate our schemes and compare their performances to two other approaches. The results show that our joint utility company selection and shiftable load scheduling scheme incurs the least cost to the users.