Decentralised Electricity Markets and Proactive Customer Behaviour

Abstract

The energy transition in Germany takes part in decentral structures. With the ongoing integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) into the electricity supply system, supply-side is therefore becoming increasingly decentral and volatile due to the specific generation characteristics. A rather inflexible demand-side, on the other hand, increases the effort to gain the necessary equilibrium between generation and consumption. This paper discusses how consumer behaviour can be influenced by real-time pricing to align demand with generation. Therefore, a combination of two different approaches is used, (I) The Cellular Approach (CA) and (II) Agent Based Modelling (ABM). A model is set up considering a regional energy market, where regional electricity products can be traded peer-to-peer regarding each consumer’s preferences. The observation is made for a whole distribution grid including all types of consumers. The investigations show that energy purchases can be stimulated individually by a flexible pricing mechanism and met preferences. Moreover, benefits occur for the whole region and potentials arise to smooth the exchange balance to the superordinate grid level. Running the model for one entire year in a conservative generation scenario, hours of oversupply could be reduced by 18% and the consumption of green electricity generated regionally could be increased by over 125 MWh within the region itself, in comparison to a base scenario.

Prosumer Impact on Cellular Power Systems

“…Therefore, a complete description of the model will be omitted now and in the following paragraphs and only the part of the required implementations will be discussed. A detailed REMM description can be found in [13].…”

“…The scale factor assigned to each agent was randomly chosen from a given domain during the model setup (see Table 1). Constraints ensure that the REMM accurately depicts the overall distribution of households or business sizes in Germany and thus their overall electricity consumption (see [13]). In total, the REMM comprised 15,407 RSL and 1638 BSL agents.…”

“…Each prosumer can operate either only one type of generation unit or both combined. The individual generation capacities of these units are aligned with the annual electricity consumption of the operating agents, based on specific criteria (see [13]). Generation from PV relies heavily on solar radiation.…”

“…All agents not served in the first two clearing steps, as well as those who initially decided to purchase interregional electricity, are served in the third step. For more information on determining the WTP and switching to alternative products, refer to [13].…”