Stackelberg Game Based Pricing Mechanism for Service Provision of Cloud Energy Storage

On the load side of the power grid, energy storage (ES) can act as a flexible transfer station to relieve the power pressure of users and absorb new energy, for ensuring the stability of the power system and improve the economy of users. Currently, the concept of cloud energy storage(CES) service mode under the background of sharing economy has attracted much attention. Under the CES service system independently invested and operated by a third party, how to price and formulate scheduling strategies to reach a mutually beneficial situation for users and operators is an important research topic at present. Thus, a CES service architecture and pricing mechanism is proposed in the paper, and establishes a Stackelberg game model in which operators and users seek to maximize their respective benefits. The upper layer operator that provides virtual energy storage discharge service releases the discharge electricity price and sends it to the user. The lower layer user decides its own load plan and power purchase strategy according to the virtual energy storage discharge electricity price released by the operator and reports it to the operator. The operator then adjusts the electricity price according to the user's plan. After the lower model is transformed into KKT conditional substitution, the bilayer model can be transformed into monolayer model, and it can be converted to mixed integer quadratic programming problem with Boolean expansion method. The numerical results show the proposed method can realize the reasonable pricing of CES users by operators, and reduce the electricity cost purchased by users while ensuring the benefits of operators.