A Decentralized Game Theoretic Approach for Virtual Storage System Aggregation in a Residential Community

Abstract

The current electricity market is better described as an oligopoly than a market of perfect competition from which, in fact, it may be rather far. The increasing penetration of residential distributed energy resources has led to a significant number of prosumers in the electricity market. Microgrid community, a group of single controllable entity prosumers, is a promising component of the smart grid which will potentially yield a free electricity market. In this paper, we present a novel formation for a residential community microgrid that includes a coalition of prosumer households with solar photovoltaic systems. These households are connected through a virtual power bank that consists of households' storage batteries and that mediates the communications between the households and the main grid. Using an application of mean field game theory, we find Nash Equilibrium strategies under which such sharing could minimize a linear combination of the households' energy generation cost, energy consumption cost and revenue of sold energy. The resulting approach is tested on a case study of a constructed community micro-grid in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The proposed mean field game approach can help decrease the aggregated cost and the individual energy cost. A comparative analytical study on the benefit of sharing was also performed, demonstrating that each prosumer is expected to have at least a 40 percent reduction on their individual cost if belonging to a microgrid community of 100 prosumers located in Montreal city.

Renewable Energy Communities in Islands: A Maltese Case Study

“…The scheduling heuristic makes use of a day-ahead auction approach to share the resources within the REC by making use of a time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. Aziz, Dagdougui and Elhallaoui [17] applied mean field game theory to determine Nash equilibrium strategies for an REC that includes 100 prosumers (with solar photovoltaic systems), located in Montreal city. The REC is formed through a virtual power bank that contains the distributed BESSs of the prosumers.…”

“…The aggregation of participants in RECs is also advantageous to the distribution system operators (DSOs) as multiple flexible assets can be accessed through a single reference point. Recent literature on RECs has addressed issues related to the regulatory barriers [3][4][5][6][7], maximization of self-sufficiency [8][9][10][11], local energy sharing strategies [12][13][14][15][16][17] and the interaction of RECs with the power system [3,18].…”

A Survey of Recent Advances in the Smart Management of Microgrids and Networked Microgrids

“…Some recent papers are highlighted in the followings in order to give to the reader an overview on how GT is used for MG/NMG management [82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90]. First, a hybrid EMS architecture based on canonical coalition games for cooperative power exchange management in NMGs, interconnected with the main grid via a macro station, is proposed by Querini et al [82].…”

“…Results indicate reduced market power and operating costs. In [90], Aziz et al present a game theoretic analysis for community MGs including a coalition of prosumer households with photovoltaic solar panels. Using an application of mean field game theory, the authors highlight that Nash equilibrium strategies enable minimizing both the households' energy generation cost and the energy consumption cost.…”