This study focuses on helping the government in constructing a pricing scheme which benefits all income classes in achieving a trade-off level in their comfortability and affordability in energy consumption. To illustrate the approach, we deeply research on the thermal factor, which is accounted for major part of the electric usage but is often ignored when the government design the policy. To ensure the thoughtfulness of the policy not only from the user’s side but also for the government’s side, four factors, namely, thermal comfort, electricity affordability, their trade-off level, and the government’s benefit ratio are also investigated. Their impacts on the pricing scheme are illustrated and analyzed in five scenarios based on the Delhi’s data. The solution coming from the simulated annealing algorithm suggests that with proper subsidy scheme based on usage amount, both government and income classes obtain their satisfactions where users have a higher trade-off level in their comfortability and affordability and government receives a higher benefit.

This study focuses on helping the government in constructing a pricing scheme which benefits all income classes in achieving a trade-off level in their comfortability and affordability in energy consumption. To illustrate the approach, we deeply research on the thermal factor, which is accounted for major part of the electric usage but is often ignored when the government design the policy. To ensure the thoughtfulness of the policy not only from the user’s side but also for the government’s side, four factors, namely, thermal comfort, electricity affordability, their trade-off level, and the government’s benefit ratio are also investigated. Their impacts on the pricing scheme are illustrated and analyzed in five scenarios based on the Delhi’s data. The solution coming from the simulated annealing algorithm suggests that with proper subsidy scheme based on usage amount, both government and income classes obtain their satisfactions where users have a higher trade-off level in their comfortability and affordability and government receives a higher benefit.

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