Method Of Optimal Time-of-use Price For Large Electric Power Consumers

Time-of-use electricity price is a necessary method for electric power demand side management. Proper TOU price not only stands for the value of electric power commodity, but also has a guiding function in the behaviors of consumers. Research on TOU electricity price of big consumers makes great sense.This paper introduces the research status of TOU price, big consumers’ demand response under TOU price and self-generation power plant at the beginning, following by the basic principles of bi-level programming. After that comes out a bi-level optimization model of big consumers’ TOU price.In the upper level, the power company sets the TOU price and deliver it to the big consumer. While in the lower level, the big consumer makes own production plan to minimize the electricity costs based on the TOU price from the upper level.In order to handle the complexity of the bi-level optimization model, this paper presents a hybrid optimization combining genetic algorithms and mixed-integer linear programming to solve the problem. This hybrid optimization solves the upper level problem by genetic algorithm, and mixed-integer linear programming solving the lower level problem.In the last, numerical examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results of two examples were compared, one didn’t apply the hybrid method and the other applied. The differences of the results strongly proves the effectiveness of the hybrid method. In addition, self-generation power plant’s feed-in tariff of peak times were improved to make a numerical example, the results of which show that greatly decrease the cost of the large consumer, this reveals an improving direction of the optimization model.