Optimal Electricity Pricing for Societal Infrastructure Systems

We develop a general framework for pricing electricity in order to optimally manage the electricity load of societal infrastructures that interact with power systems through their price-responsive electricity load. In such infrastructure systems, electricity is not the sole resource needed to serve users’ needs. Examples include cloud computing infrastructure or electric transportation networks. In these cases, other shared networked resources such as charging stations or communication links and data centers are also required to serve users. Hence, pricing of electricity becomes intertwined to managing other congestible resources not priced by the power system operator, leading to a complex economic dispatch problem. For brevity of notation, our analysis is performed under a static setting. We discuss how the power system operator should model the effects of the mobility of loads and congestion in the infrastructure in the economic dispatch. We numerically study the performance of our algorithms using the example of a simple electric transportation network.