Commercial Load Profile Sensitivity Analysis to Electricity Tariffs and Battery Characteristics

The electricity tariff is a powerful tool to encourage customers to modify their electricity consumption behavior. A significant portion of power energy is devoted to the commercial sector which has a notable contribution in the power grid peak load. In this article, we consider a commercial customer equipped with a solar panel and batteries as our case study. We analyze the effects of time of use (TOU) and maximum demand (MD) tariffs on the power exchange. Next, the sensitivity analysis of the load profile to the MD and battery characteristics is performed. Using the optimization and sensitivity analysis information, the optimum MD tariff rates for a group of the commercial customers is calculated to release the maximum network capacity in the power grid. The optimization in this study is formulated such that the interests of both the customers and the utilities are served.