Integrated Demand Side Management Game in Smart Energy Hubs

The presence of energy hubs and the advancement in smart grid technologies have motivated system planners to deploy intelligent multicarrier energy systems entitled “smart energy hub” (S.E. Hub). In this paper, we model S.E. Hub, and propose a modern energy management technique in electricity and natural gas networks based on integrated demand side management (IDSM). In conventional studies, energy consumption is optimized from the perspective of each individual user without considering the interactions with each other. Here, the interaction among S.E. Hubs in IDSM program is formulated as a noncooperative game. The existence and uniqueness of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium (NE) is proved. Additionally, the strategies for each S.E. Hub are determined by proposing a distributed algorithm. We also address the IDSM game in a cloud computing (CC) framework to achieve efficient data processing and information management. Simulations are performed on a grid consisting of ten S.E. Hubs. We compare the CC framework with conventional data processing techniques to evaluate the efficiency of our proposed approach in determining NE. It is also shown that in the NE, the energy cost for each S.E. Hub and the peak-to-average ratio of the electricity demand decrease substantially.