Pricing scheme to ease energy poverty of low‐income population in smart grid

Abstract

Demand Response (DR) program is an important component of a cyber‐physical energy infrastructure. The DR pilot projects in Europe, North America, and Australia showed that some consumers respond, few consumers marginally respond while some consumers do not respond at all to the DR programs. DR program basically uses pricing schemes, namely, flat price, time‐of‐use price, inclined block rate price, real‐time price, and threshold based real‐time price. The problem with these pricing schemes is that consumers (specifically those who have low‐income) have to pay electricity bill which is not feasible for them. So, they suffer from energy poverty, that is, they are not able to purchase even the minimum amount of energy which suffices their requirements. The DR program is basically of two types, namely (a) active DR program, and (b) passive DR program. This article is about the pricing scheme which would be used in the passive DR program. This article is proposing a novel pricing scheme to ease the energy poverty issue of low‐income group of population. This article proposes an idea of population categorization based on wealth and an idea to find suitable thresholds for proposed pricing scheme.

Comparative analysis of dynamic pricing schemes in distributed energy management of residential users in smart grid

“…The results obtained using the combined pricing model are superior to those obtained by using only the RTP scheme. Another novel pricing scheme combining flat price, RTP, and IBR is compared with flat price, TOU, RTP, and IBR pricing scheme individually [36]. A distributed appliance scheduling problem [37] is analyzed considering TOU and LPS.…”