Retail Electricity Pricing Impacts on Demand Response and Electrical Vehicles Planning in Residential Micro-grid

In recent years, proposing the novel solutions to boost the efficiency of power systems and optimal management of energy consumption has become increasingly significant. Demand response (DR) program as an essential part of Demand-side-management (DSM), has always been one of the most efficient ways to attract consumers to alter their power consumption patterns. In general, DR’s programs can be carried out by implementing electricity retail pricing. In this paper, first, an overview of the principles and rules of retail electricity pricing in the context of Smart Grid is presented. Then, new retail pricing methods have been applied in an optimization framework of energy management in Micro-grid. It can be noted that the analysis of this residential Micro-grid is performed with the presence of multi-carrier energy including electricity and gas systems. Also, a hybrid tariff plan, that is more in line with other pricing principles is proposed to evaluate its effectiveness in studied home micro-grid surveyed. To appraise the efficiency of the optimization framework and the proposed method of retail electricity pricing, numerous numerical studies have been done. Finally, simulation results indicate that the economic and social indicators including benefit, energy payment cost (EPC) and social welfare of the customer are optimized by zeroing out EPC and receiving a daily charge of about 1.31 pounds –on average- due to the presence in the retail electricity market.