Pricing Strategy of Multi-Energy Provider Considering Integrated Demand Response

Residential users (RUs) are the vital component of terminal energy consumption. The development and application of integrated energy system (IES) and smart homes has promoted RUs to actively take part in the trading with multi-energy provider (MEP) for its preferential energy prices and services. This paper proposes a pricing strategy of MEP by using a Stackelberg game-based bi-level programming model. In the upper level model, the adjustment coefficient of electric power price is optimized by MEP to increase the trading probability with RUs. In the lower level model, an integrated demand response (IDR) program is proposed for RUs to optimize the flexible loads in home energy management system (HEMS). Specially, a HEMS is composed of a smart interactive terminal, a micro combined cooling, heating, and power (mCCHP) system and multi-energy loads. Case study shows that, on one hand, the energy optimization based on IDR can help RUs manage their multi-energy loads and reduce the expected energy cost. On the other hand, the proposed price strategy of MEP can increase the trading probability, which promote more RUs to trade with MEP, thus increasing the MEP's benefit by 12.29%. The research proves that the proposed strategy is a win-win strategy and it is efficient in the pre-decision-making progress for MEP in the energy trading market.