Optimal power procurement and demand response with quality-of-usage guarantees

In this paper, we propose a general operating scheme which allows the utility company to jointly perform power procurement and demand response so as to maximize the social welfare. Our model takes into consideration the effect of the renewable energy and the multi-stage feature of the power procurement process. It also enables the utility company to provide quality-of-usage (QoU) guarantee to the power consumers, which ensures that the average power usage level meets the target value for each user. To maximize the social welfare, we develop a low-complexity algorithm called the welfare maximization algorithm (WMA), which performs joint power procurement and dynamic pricing. WMA is constructed based on a two-timescale Lyapunov optimization technique. We prove that WMA achieves a close-to-optimal utility and ensures that the QoU requirement is met with bounded deficit. WMA can be implemented in a distributed manner and is robust with respect to system dynamics uncertainty.