Improving the economic operation of power grid in China: Demand-side measures

With the high-speed economic development in China, the shortage in power supply has become a great social problem for both the government and power grid companies. Demand-side management has been an important approach to decrease the total electricity demand in the peak load period and thus improve the economic operation of the power grid. We proposed a methodology from the demand-side perspective considering both political and economic measures in the context of the Chinese electricity industry. The political measure refers to the rearrangement of the workdays and rest days of a week for customers, which aims at changing the weekly load curve of the power grid company. The economic measure refers to optimization of the daily load curve by time-of-use prices. A realistic numerical example is used to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.