  This paper explores an idea of demand-supply balance for smart grids in which
consumers are expected to play a significant role. The main objective is to
motivate the consumer, by maximizing their benefit both as a seller and a
buyer, to trade their surplus energy with the grid so as to balance the demand
at the peak hour. To that end, a Stackelberg game is proposed to capture the
interactions between the grid and consumers, and it is shown analytically that
optimal energy trading parameters that maximize customers utilities are
obtained at the solution of the game. A novel distributed algorithm is proposed
to reach the optimal solution of the game, and numerical examples are used to
assess the properties and effectiveness of the proposed approach.
