Designing a pareto-superior time-varying pricing for residential prosumers

Abstract

In recent years, residential electricity consumption has been rapidly increasing, leading to inevitable power grid reinforcement. To cope with these challenges Demand Side Management (DSM) can play an important role and Time of use (ToU) pricing is increasingly seen as the most viable DSM option by policy-makers. However, it is imperative to investigate how an alteration of electricity prices will affect the power utilities as well as the consumers. This paper assesses the development of a ToU tariff structure and its impacts on a pilot-network of residential prosumers in terms of changes in electricity demand and peak load shifting. The obtained results demonstrated that the percentage of total consumption measured during peak hours was reduced by 3.19%, 1.03% and 1.40% for the summer, middle and winter season, respectively. Additionally, a comparison of the average annual consumption of the smart prosumers with the rest of the consumers indicated a sizable reduction of 2.18% leading to the conclusion that the developed ToU tariff structure was the motivating force for the prosumers to change their energy behaviour.