Game-Theoretic Demand Side Management of Thermostatically Controlled Loads for Smoothing Tie-Line Power of Microgrids

Thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) are regarded as one of the promising resources for suppressing power fluctuations due to renewable energy (RENs). However, due to the great burdens of fully considering each users' characteristics, it is difficult to achieve unity of the individual optimal decisions and global optimum in demand-side management (DSM). This paper proposes a game-theoretic DSM that can optimize the global power consumption schedule by individual TCL user's optimization. By integrating the prediction of REN outputs into the pricing mechanism, the proposed DSM can guide the users to make their best power consumption schedules along with intermittent REN generations, thus to smooth the tie-line power of microgrids. In this paper, a novel pricing mechanism is firstly developed based on the concave N-person game theory, which is more adaptive and flexible compared with existing game-theoretic DSM. Then, an individual's power consumption optimization and its simplified model are developed considering the constraints of the TCL model and personal preferences. The simplified model can be easily solved and achieve a fast solution in the power consumption game. An implementation framework of the proposed DSM is further developed for practical application. Finally, numerical studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed models and methods.