Stackelberg game-based interactive operation strategy for energy-intensive industrial users

With increasing awareness of environmental protection and rising carbon emission costs, participation in electricity and carbon markets for energy-intensive industrial users will become an effective way to reduce operating costs and carbon emissions. In this regard, a novel Stackelberg game framework is developed in this study for coordinated participation in coupled electricity-carbon markets. Specifically, generalized carbon emission models and electricity consumption models for different energy-intensive industrial users are established, and a Stackelberg game-based interactive operation strategy is proposed for load aggregators (LAs) and energy-intensive industrial users in joint electricity-carbon markets, where the LA works as a leader who chooses proper interactive prices to maximize the comprehensive benefit, whereas energy-intensive industrial users serve as followers who minimize the total energy costs in response to the interactive prices set by the LA. Then, the existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) are analyzed, and a decentralized solution algorithm is suggested to reach the SE. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed interactive operation strategy can not only increase the profit of the LA but also reduce the cost of energy-intensive industrial users, which achieves a win-win result.