An Energy Sharing Mechanism Achieving the Same Flexibility as Centralized Dispatch

TL;DR

This paper introduces a peer-to-peer energy sharing mechanism that enables distributed renewable energy users to achieve the same flexibility as centralized systems, while protecting privacy and ensuring scalability.

Contribution

It proposes a novel energy sharing scheme with a proof of equivalence to centralized dispatch and develops algorithms for computing operating flexibility.

Findings

Mechanism achieves same flexibility as centralized dispatch.

Proposed algorithms are scalable and effective.

The concept of absorbable region measures operating flexibility.

Abstract

Deploying distributed renewable energy at the demand side is an important measure to implement a sustainable society. However, the massive small solar and wind generation units are beyond the control of a central operator. To encourage users to participate in energy management and reduce the dependence on dispatchable resources, a peer-to-peer energy sharing scheme is proposed which releases the flexibility at the demand side. Every user makes decision individually considering only local constraints; the microgrid operator announces the sharing prices subjective to the coupling constraints without knowing users' local constraints. This can help protect privacy. We prove that the proposed mechanism can achieve the same disutility and flexibility as centralized dispatch, and develop an effective modified best response based algorithm for reaching the market equilibrium. The concept of absorbable region is presented to measure the operating flexibility under the proposed energy sharing mechanism. A linear programming based polyhedral projection algorithm is developed to compute that region. Case studies validate the theoretical results and show that the proposed method is scalable.