Large electricity customers (e.g., large data centers) can exhibit huge and variable electricity demands, which poses significant challenges for the electricity suppliers to plan for sufficient capacity. Thus, it is desirable to design incentive and coordination mechanisms between the customers and the supplier to lower the capacity cost. This paper proposes a novel scheme based on flexible contracts. Unlike existing demand-side management schemes in the literature, a flexible contract leads to information revelation. That is, a customer committing to a flexible contract reveals valuable information about its future demand to the supplier. Such information revelation allows the customers and the supplier to share the risk of future demand uncertainty. On the other hand, the customer will still retain its autonomy in operation. We address two key challenges for the design of optimal flexible contracts: i) the contract design is a non-convex optimization problem and is intractable for a large number of customer types, and ii) the design should be robust to unexpected or adverse responses of the customers, i.e., a customer facing more than one contract yielding the same benefit may choose the contract less favorable to the supplier. We address these challenges by proposing sub-optimal contracts of low computational complexity that can achieve a provable fraction of the performance gain under the global optimum.

中文翻译：

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通过灵活的合同和承诺学习大型电力负载


大型电力客户（例如大型数据中心）可能会表现出巨大且可变的电力需求，这对电力供应商规划足够的容量提出了重大挑战。因此，需要在客户和供应商之间设计激励和协调机制以降低产能成本。本文提出了一种基于灵活合约的新颖方案。与文献中现有的需求方管理方案不同，灵活的合同导致信息披露。也就是说，承诺签订灵活合同的客户向供应商透露了有关其未来需求的有价值的信息。这种信息披露允许客户和供应商分担未来需求不确定性的风险。另一方面，客户仍将保留经营自主权。我们解决了设计最优灵活合约的两个关键挑战：i）合约设计是一个非凸优化问题，对于大量客户类型来说是棘手的；ii）设计应该对意外或不利的响应具有鲁棒性。客户，即面临多个产生相同利益的合同的客户可能会选择对供应商不利的合同。我们通过提出低计算复杂度的次优合约来解决这些挑战，这些合约可以在全局最优下实现可证明的性能增益部分。