Research on Charge Pricing Model of New Energy Cloud Service
Jinsong Liu
1
, Yu Shan
2
, Caijuan Qi
3
, Xiangying Xie
2
, Zelong Zhang
3
, Yufei Ai
2
and Leyi Ge
2
1
Development Planning Department, State Grid Co., Ltd., Beijing, China
2
Photovoltaic Cloud Division , China Net E-commerce Co., Ltd., Beijing, China
3
Institute of Economics and Technology, National Network Ningxia Electric Power Co., Ltd., Ningxia, China
Keywords: New Energy Cloud Service, Pricing Model, New Energy Cloud Business Model.
Abstract: The new energy cloud aims to help achieve the national clean energy transformation and promote the
upgrading of energy transformation production and consumption. Based on China's energy resources and
energy transformation needs, as an emerging field, the new energy cloud business model still has a lot of
research space. In order to use price leverage to adjust the relationship between user demand and cloud
service supply, this paper examines its cloud service pricing model. This paper studies the contract pricing
method to make the use of idle resources in the service market more reasonable, improve the utilization
efficiency of cloud service resources, and alleviate market pressure. Finally, the purpose of rationally using
cloud service resources and optimizing market cloud service resources is achieved.
1 INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing resources are virtualized by a huge
number of physical IT resources such as CPU,
storage, and network. The amount of tasks the
system has to handle is very arduous, and the
resources are dynamic and heterogeneous. In the
cloud environment, there are a large number of
users. In addition, as cloud computing shifts from
technology to application, system-based resource
allocation can no longer meet business needs. There
is an urgent need to use the market as a carrier to
study the optimization of cloud services. Therefore,
"cloud computing" as a business model, how to
schedule resources in the cloud service market
efficiently and reasonably, and how to conduct
pricing and transaction reasonably to achieve the
global optimization of the market has become the
focus and difficulty of cloud computing market
research (
Lin, Su, Meng, Liu, Liu, 2013). Scholars such
as Christof Weinhardt proposed two important
pricing models: pay-as-you-go pricing model and
subscription pricing model. Based on that, Lamia
Youssef and other scholars proposed three forms of
pricing models, and pointed out that no matter which
pricing model, it must adopt at least one form. The
three forms are: per-unit pricing, tiered-pricing, and
subscription-based pricing (
Eason, Noble, Sneddon,
1955, Jose, Calero, Aguado, 2015, Yu, Chen, Li, 2014
).
In addition, Amazon had also proposed a dynamic
pricing form as pricing on-site instances. Typical
cloud service providers, such as Google, Amazon,
and Microsoft, all adopt these four forms in their
pricing mod.
2 PRICING MECHANISM FOR
CLOUD SERVICE RESOURCES
Pricing has become an important link in the
development of new energy cloud services. Only
mature pricing strategies and mechanisms can
ensure the commercial realization of the entire new
energy cloud service market. Due to the different
usage of service resources by users, in order to meet
the diverse needs of users, the service resources
provided by the market need to be expanded
indefinitely and can be obtained at any time by
users. Therefore, how to provide users with flexible,
diverse and convenient pricing mode has become the
key to survival in the current cloud service market.
There are many pricing factors involved in the
pricing of the cloud service market, and the pricing
work is relatively difficult and complicated. Internet
has become not only a simple tool for transmitting
service information, but also a network tool for
918
Liu, J., Shan, Y., Qi, C., Xie, X., Zhang, Z., Ai, Y. and Ge, L.
Research on Charge Pricing Model of New Energy Cloud Service.
DOI: 10.5220/0011358900003440
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Big Data Economy and Digital Management (BDEDM 2022), pages 918-923
ISBN: 978-989-758-593-7
Copyright
c
 2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All r ights reserved

transmitting computing power in a cloud
environment. Pricing is not just pricing for network
resources, but involves more pricing factors, which
brings new challenges for network resources.
Currently, the pricing mechanism of the cloud
service market mainly includes the following:
Amazon's EC2 pricing mechanism, and Google App
Engine's pricing mechanism. In order to meet the
needs of different users, Amazon has developed a
flexible and elastic pricing mechanism. Amazon's
Elastic Compute Cloud is the largest online retailer
on the Internet. Amazon has introduced different
billing models based on multiple service instances of
cloud service resources. In terms of use, users need
to select a virtual machine with corresponding
configuration (instance storage space, memory,
computing unit, etc.) as the running instance
according to their own needs. However, Amazon
will generally choose one or multiple running
instances at the same time to meet user needs when
deploying network programs. In the elastic cloud
EC2, users can manage each instance on the cloud
platform through the web operation interface. The
instance payment pricing method generally varies
depending on the user's usage. The instance payment
method of Elastic Cloud EC2 is hierarchical, which
is mainly based on the two aspects of instance type
and specification type. Users select the appropriate
instance type and specification type according to
their own needs. Elastic Cloud EC2 is based on the
computing power required to process user tasks and
the configuration of the selected virtual machine as
the upper limit of the parameters. The EC2 instance
types are summarized into the following three
categories. It is large-scale, small-scale and medium-
sized instance. Amazon sets prices for them
according to the above three instance methods,
namely contract pricing, on-demand pricing, and
spot real-time pricing. The pricing of data
transmission mainly considers two aspects: the
amount of outgoing and incoming data. The
outgoing data is free of charge within the first 1GB
flow rate per month, and the subsequent service flow
is charged according to the user's actual usage. The
more the price, the cheaper it is. The incoming data
is priced at a fixed price. There is no charge for data
transmission in the internal network, and the price is
based on the amount of data in different regional
networks. Data storage uses hard drives as the
pricing factor, and adopts a comprehensive pricing
strategy for duration and usage. Google App Engine
implements a flexible and changeable service
pricing mechanism. Each service resource is
measured and charged according to two parts: a
fixed quota and a charging quota, and allows daily
users to purchase resources in advance according to
their own wishes. The charging quota is the
maximum resource usage required by the user daily.
The fixed quota is the maximum amount of service
resources that each user can obtain on the market set
by Google itself.
3 NEW ENERGY CLOUD
SERVICE CHARGE PRICING
MODEL
In order to formulate a pricing model for the new
energy cloud service market. There are three
aspects: First, determine the contract and on-demand
pricing strategy for new energy cloud services in the
electricity market under the condition of maximizing
user utility. Second, based on contracts and on-
demand pricing to determine the market's optimal
pricing strategy according to the maximization of
market revenue. Third, according to the actual use of
the market, there will be a large amount of idle
resources during certain periods of use by users. At
this time, it is necessary to study and formulate
pricing strategies for spot instances to make
reasonable use of these idle resources. Pricing at this
time is also seen as an incentive mechanism to adjust
users' market service usage behavior, so as to
achieve market equilibrium and efficient use of the
overall market. The cloud service provider develops
and provides available cloud services continuously.
On the one hand, the resources that constitute the
service requires cost expenditure; on the other hand,
because the provision of resources or services is in
order to profit, the provider will charge a certain fee
to users for resources or services. Here, the resource
is the basic module that constitutes the service,
which is controlled and managed by the provider.
Providers combine different resources into different
performance levels of services in a variety of ways
and provide them to customers. For customers, they
use services, resources are invisible to customers,
but resources are a key element for measuring
service performance and the level of service it can
reach. Therefore, customers sometimes have to pay a
certain fee in order to continue to rent and obtain the
qualification to use the service. Moreover, the level
and performance of the services obtained are related
to the level of fees paid. The higher the cost, the
higher the performance and level of the service. The
cost paid by the customer depends on the price of
Research on Charge Pricing Model of New Energy Cloud Service
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the service provided by the provider. The following
are several cloud service charging pricing models:
3.1 Pay-As-You-Go Pricing Model
Pay-as-you-go is that customers pay for each unit of
resources they use at a stable price, sometimes called
pay-for-use. In other words, pay-as-you-go is
charged based on the amount of resources actually
used by the customer (such as the number of
instances, amount of data, or usage time, etc.). The
actual amount of resources used can be the total
amount of use after a period of time (such as one
month, one day, and one hour). During this time
period, the price of the resource is stable.
3.2 Contract Pricing Model
The contract price model is that the customer signs a
contract (in the form of prepayment) to order a
certain service or combination of services at a stable
price for a long period of time. By paying an
advance payment to order a service, some papers
refer to it as an on-demand advance payment. The
two pricing models also reflect the characteristics of
cloud computing services that can be expanded on
demand and flexibly customized. Therefore, the
pricing strategy of cloud computing service
providers for cloud services is based on these two
pricing models.
3.3 Pricing Per Unit
Pricing per unit is the basic form of the pay-as-you-
go pricing model, which is usually applied to data
transmission services or services that use memory.
The provider determines a fixed price per unit of
resource or service in advance, and then charges the
total service fee based on the total amount used by
the customer by multiplying the price per unit by the
total amount used. Cloud service providers such as
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft charge USD 0.01
per thousand per month for PUT and POST, and
charge USD 0.01 per ten thousand per month for
GET and HEAD. This is the price per unit, and the
units are every thousand times per month and every
hundred times per month. Another example is GAE
(Google App Engine) which provides APIs with a
free quota per application (/app/day) per day, and
pricing for parts exceeding the free quota.
Table 1: Table1 Pricing of APIs.
APIs Free Quota/
app/da
y
Price beyond Free
Quota(US)
Datastore
API
50k freeread/
write/small
$0.10/100k write ops
$0.07/100k read ops
$0.01/100k small ops
Blobstore
API
5G $0.13/G/month
Email API 100 recipients $0.01/100recipients
Gae APIs takes the form of pricing per unit, and
the unit of free quota is per application per day (/
APP / day). In other words, the free quota for daily
reading, writing or small operations of the datastore
API is 50K; The daily free quota of blobstore API is
5g; The daily free quota of email API is 100
recipients. The units that exceed the free quota are
different. For example, the datastoreapi charges $0.1
per 100k write operation, $0.07 per 100k read
operation and $0.01 per 100k small operation. Its
unit has become x operation per 100k (x refers to
read, write and small), which is different from the
free quota unit (every day). As for the charge per
"write" operation, it is higher than that per "read".
This is generally because "write" consumes more
storage devices than "read", and "write" is more
difficult to achieve than "read", which takes a long
time and occupies more resources. Therefore, the
cost of "write" operation is usually higher than that
of "read" operation. When the blobstore API exceeds
5g per day, it will charge us $0.13 per g per month,
and the unit will become per g per month (/ g /
month). It will be charged in natural months after the
total amount is accumulated. After the email API
receives more than 100 recipients per day, it will
charge us $0.01 for every 100 recipients, and its unit
will become every 100 recipients (/ 100recipients). It
is the same unit of measurement for the same
resource / service, but the free quota is different
from the unit of measurement after exceeding the
free quota, which shows that the pricing per unit is a
relatively flexible and simple pricing form. It allows
users to flexibly customize the size of resources and
the pricing method of resources according to specific
application requirements, which is suitable for
customers who need to frequently adjust and
calculate the scale of resources. Customers don't
have to think too much about the troublesome it
resource purchase plan, and can break up the large
cost of one-time purchase of resources into the
scattered cost of multiple purchases.
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3.4 Tiered Pricing
Tiered pricing refers to the provision of cloud
resources to customers in the form of several
different levels, and different prices are set for
different levels of resources. The level of resource
mapping to the customer is the level of service.
Service Level (Service Level) is a set of expected
and implicit quality of service. The resources of each
level provide the same and fixed computing power
or storage capacity to customers in the service level.
The higher the level, the higher the quality of
services such as the quantity and performance of
resources, and the different prices. Provider ’ s
tiered pricing is a combination of resource tiered and
per-unit pricing. Classification is to classify the
performance or total amount of resources or
services, and the price per unit is the price of
resources or services within each class. Pay-as-you-
go pricing models also often use this pricing form.
The storage services, computing instances, and data
transmissions in Google, Amazon, and Microsoft
cloud services all adopt hierarchical pricing to
provide customers with different levels of services
and charge different fees based on the total amount
of resources used by customers. For example, the
computing instances provided by GCE (Google
Compute Engine) have four levels: small, medium,
large, and super large. The quality of service
achieved by each level is gradually improved, that
is, the configured virtual kernel, memory, and hard
disk gradually expand per unit.
The resources configured by GCE for the small
instance level are 1 virtual kernel, 3.75gb memory
and 420gb hard disk. This level is equivalent to
2.75x gceu. The price of small instances is US
$0.145 per hour. If calculated in units per gceu per
hour, one small instance is equivalent to 2.75 times
of gceu, and the price per gceu per hour is US
$0.053. Therefore, the cost of using small instances
per hour is US $0.053 * 2.75 = US $0.14575.
Generally speaking, the measurement of instance
computing power is nothing more than the number
of cores or the general measurement of CPU,
memory, hard disk and other industries. However,
sometimes cloud service providers will specially
formulate their own measurement units to measure
instance computing power for internal use, such as
Google's gceu and Amazon's ECU (ec2compute
unit). The customer can measure the computing
power of the instance according to the general
measurement of the industry, or the computing
power of the instance according to the supplier's
own measurement unit. When the provider provides
its own measurement unit to the customer, the
provider may price its own measurement unit per
unit, such as US $0.053 per gceu per hour. Of
course, the two pricing units can be converted to
each other, and the final calculated rate must be
consistent (one small instance can be converted to
2.75 times of gceu; the rate for small instances is
0.145 per hour, and the rate after gceu is converted
to small instances is US $0.14575. The error
between the two is 0.00075, and the rate is basically
the same.) therefore, in terms of classification, GCE
is divided into four levels: small, medium, large and
super large. In terms of measurement units, GCE has
two measurement units. One is the standard
measurement unit commonly used in the industry,
namely, the number of cores, memory, hard disk,
etc; The other is a self-defined unit of measure,
gceu. In terms of pricing units, GCE also divides
into two kinds of units of measurement. One is the
unit of measurement combining grade and service
time (US $0.145 per hour for small instances, US
$0.29 per hour for medium instances, US $0.58 per
hour for large instances and US $1.16 per hour for
super large instances). This is a typical hierarchical
pricing method combining resource grading and per
unit pricing; The other is the measurement unit ($/
gceu / hour) combining gceu and usage time, which
is the basic pricing method per unit and has nothing
to do with the classification of resources.
3.5 Scheduled Pricing
Scheduled pricing is a relatively preferential price
(relative preferential refers to the price per unit
pricing and tiered pricing) established by the
provider for customers to book a certain
consumption level of service. Of course, there is a
prerequisite for the relative discount, that is, the
customer needs to pay a deposit (or reservation) in
advance, and the provider can specifically reserve
the lease of resources for the customer. Since
reservation pricing does not accurately measure the
actual use of resources and services by customers,
On the one hand, providers may suffer losses due to
underestimation of the actual usage of resources
used by customers. On the other hand, the provider
may overestimate the actual use of resources,
making the resources underutilized, resulting in
inefficient use of resources。However, because the
provider shows the customer a relatively favorable
price model for the reservation form, it has become
the most widely used reservation pricing model that
attracts customers. At the same time, reservation
pricing combines the strategy of per-unit pricing and
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hierarchical pricing, dividing resources and services
into different levels, determining the prepayment of
each level, and tiered pricing. Cloud computing is
considered to be a business model for the delivery of
new IT resources. Due to it is a new business service
that its price largely determines the extent to which
the service attracts customers, and thus determines
the provider's competitive advantage. In order to
compete for the huge benefits brought by cloud
computing, various cloud computing providers have
launched a "price war". Providers constantly adjust
the price level of services according to market
reflections, competitors ’ actions, their own
expectations, etc., constantly launch new service
models and new pricing methods to meet customer
service needs to a greater extent. Keep existing
customers and attract new customers to compete
with competitors.
4 OPTIMAL PRICING METHOD
FOR NEW ENERGY CLOUD
SERVICE MARKET-
CONTRACT PRICING
METHOD
Due to the particularity of new energy cloud
services, which provide services for specific objects
in specific markets, this paper studies the use of
contract pricing methods. The contract pricing
strategy refers to charging a fixed service fee to the
user during the service time period specified by the
user. The fee charged by the market has nothing to
do with the user's service resource usage during the
service time period. It is a contract that has been
signed with the market in advance. Such as monthly
pricing method is suitable for the early establishment
of the cloud market, under a small number of service
users, the cloud service providers in order to expand
the number of users and the rapid subsequent
occupation as a pricing market used. The monthly
pricing method is that the service provider provides
a fixed amount of cloud services for users, and a
fixed total fee is deducted once a month, and each
individual service is no longer separately deducted.
In the pricing method of the cloud service market,
contract pricing method is very common. It has the
following advantages: For cloud service providers,
they can take advantage of the obvious lower service
price advantage of the initial cloud service market
and the relatively low initial construction cost of the
cloud service market to provide users with a simple
and affordable way to obtain information services.
For users, a fixed service can generally be obtained
at a relatively suitable price, and the expenditure is
relatively fixed, which can stimulate the user's
service usage to a certain extent. Under the
contractual pricing strategy, maximizing the user’s
personal utility will drive the user to maximize the
use of cloud service resources in the market. When
all users in the market adopt this kind of contract
pricing strategy, it will lead to collective irrational
market congestion. Then the quality of cloud service
resources provided to users will decrease, and the
service time will increase. Therefore, it is necessary
to use a price mechanism to reduce the user's usage
of cloud service resources, so that the user's usage of
service resources is less than its corresponding
service resource utilization rate.
Contract pricing method is the most widely used
pricing model in the cloud environment for resolving
service negotiations with users. It is a model based
on a contract mechanism and is often used to
manage the exchange of goods and services in the
service market. It can help find an appropriate
service resource to complete a given user demand
task. Service resource consumers (users) publish
their budget and time required for task execution
through the cloud broker. If the service resource
provider is satisfied with the conditions issued by
the cloud broker, it will sign an agreement with the
cloud broker. The advantage of this model is that if
the selected service resource provider (cloud service
provider) cannot provide a satisfactory service
result, the cloud service resource consumer can
choose other capable cloud service resource
providers.
5 CONCLUSIONS
This paper studies the contract pricing model in
terms of pricing issues in the cloud service market.
This model does not require cloud brokers to
negotiate with buyers and sellers but directly signs
purchase contracts, which greatly simplifies the
process of resource invocation and improves the
service efficiency of service resources. However, in
the actual market billing, there are also on-demand,
spot instances, optimal pricing, and cost pricing
issues during crowded periods that need to be
considered. These issues should combine organically
to regulate market supply and demand effectively, so
as to improve the market environment.
BDEDM 2022 - The International Conference on Big Data Economy and Digital Management
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This Paper was supported by the science and
technology project of State Grid Corporation of
China “Research on Typical Application Scenarios,
Business Model and Operation Simulation
Assessment Technique of New Energy Cloud”
(SGNXJY00GHJS2000018).
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