The Retailers' Pricing Decisions Under Demand Side Management

Demand Side Management plays an important role in power marketing management.The implementation of demand-side management can effectively alleviate the power shortage situation and improve the efficiency of power.With the further deepening reform of the power market,power companies will face real competition in the market,in which case being active to explore and implement truly effective pricing strategy is necessary.Currently,the studies regarding demand-side management are rich,but most of these studies just gave conceptual framework from strategic point of view using qualitative methods.The studies concerning specific implementation details was relatively rare.A lot of studies didn't taking into account the unpredictability of price.Therefore,this paper summarizes the research practices in demand side management,and focuses on the real-time pricing and the Time-of-Use(TOU)pricing under demand side management,and further discusses the implementation effect of each price strategy.This paper divides retailers into two types: the big retailer and the small one.By establishing Bertrand and Stackelberg dynamic game model,we analyze the optimal real-time price under demand side management.Through the establishment of the interactive game model,we obtain the optimal price,the power load and each retailer's earnings under different decision orders.Furthermore,we perform numerical experiments to explore the influences of the transfer rate and the number of traditional users served by the big retailer on the optimal price,the demand and profits.Finally,we assume there is only one monopoly power company in the market,and analyze the optimal price strategy under TOU pricing framework.Comparing the prices under TOU pricing and fixed pricing strategies,we get the conclusion of the effectiveness of the implementation of TOU pricing.Next,numerical experiments are conducted to verify the impacts of transfer rate on the optimal price,profits and the effectiveness of load shifting.In addition,we extend our model taking into account the more general case that the users can transfer from one period to another one freely according to the price differences between different periods.Finally,we analyze and compare this scenario with previous one about the optimal prices,profits and the effectiveness of load shifting.