Bi-level Multi-leader Multi-follower Stackelberg Game Model for Multi-energy Retail Package Optimization

In the competitive energy market,energy retailers are facing the uncertainties of both energy price and demand,which requires them to formulate reasonable energy purchasing and selling strategies for improving their competitiveness in this market.Particularly,the attractive multi-energy retail packages are the key for retailers to increase their benefit.Therefore,combined with incentive means and price signals,five types of multi-energy retail packages such as peak-valley time-of-use(TOU)price package and day-night bundled price package are designed in this paper for retailers.The iterative interactions between retailers and end-users are modeled using a bi-level model of stochastic optimization based on multi-leader multi-follower(MLMF)Stackelberg game,in which retailers are leaders and end-users are followers.Retailers make decisions to maximize the profit considering the conditional value at risk(CVaR)while end-users optimize the satisfaction of both energy comfort and economy.Besides,a distributed algorithm is proposed to obtain the Nash equilibrium of above MLMF Stackelberg game model while the particle swarm optimization(PSO)algorithm and CPLEX solver are applied to solve the optimization model for each participant(retailer or end-user).Numeral results show that the designed retail packages can increase the overall profit of retailers,and the overall satisfaction of industrial users is the highest while that of residential users is the lowest after game interaction.

Bi-Level Bidding and Multi-Energy Retail Packages for Integrated Energy Service Providers Considering Multi-Energy Demand Elasticity

How to effectively use the multi-energy demand elasticity of users to bid in the multi-energy market and formulate multi-energy retail packages is an urgent problem which needs to be solved by integrated energy service providers(IESPs)to attract more users and reduce operating costs.This paper presents a unified clearing of electricity and natural gas based on a bi-level bidding and multi-energy retail price formulation method for IESPs considering multi-energy demand elasticity.First,we propose an operating structure of IESPs in the wholesale and retail energy markets.The multi-energy demand elasticity model of retail-side users and a retail price model for electricity,gas,heat and cooling are established.Secondly,a bi-level bidding model for IESPs considering multi-energy demand elasticity is established to provide IESPs with wholesale-side bidding decisions and retail-side energy retail price decisions.Finally,an example is given to verify the proposed method.The results show that the method improves the total social welfare of the electricity and natural gas markets by 7.99%and the profit of IESPs by 1.40%.It can reduce the variance of the electricity,gas,and cooling load curves,especially the reduction of the variance of the electricity load curve can which reach 79.90%.It can be seen that the research in this paper has a positive effect on repairing the limitations of integrated energy trading research and improving the economics of the operation of IESPs.