A New Business Model Beneficial to Both Retailers and Industrial Customers in Smart Grids

The evolution of smart grids provides opportunities for retailers to get more benefit through improving business models. As the largest energy users in the distribution grid, the industrial customers are the most suitable for retailers to advertise new services. A two-layered optimization model is proposed for a retailer to design consumption scheduling for multiple industrial customers, which aligns the maximization of profits of both parties. It considers detailed production processes of users under the scheme of time-of-use (TOU) prices as well as rewards for their demand response (DR). The scheduling results include the equipment operation time and power settings as well as suggestions for optimal production amount. An augmented realistic case study of a retailer with multiple brickyards is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The simulation result shows that with the proposed scheduling service all the players have better economic profits while the distribution grid can get more flexible operational resources from demand side.