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An international research group has used a newly designed coalitional gaming system to ensure economic equity among members of energy communities. The game system takes into account different types of prosumers that depend on autonomous systems and combinations of solar energy and storage.
An international group of scientists led by Sichuan Normal University, China, has developed a novel coalitional gaming system that maximizes the collective profit of prosumers in a community-scale peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading market.
A coalitional game is part of game theory, in which players form coalitions to achieve common goals and greater benefits.
“The methods presented in some publications are based on the premise that renewable energy and load can be accurately predicted, and this does not reflect the stochastic nature of real-world prosumer systems,” the researchers say. “It is necessary and important to develop new collational game systems and algorithms that can be applied to the stochastic environment of P2P energy trading with the participation of different types of prosumers.”
To solve this problem, scholars have introduced coalition rules into the game. One ensures that prosumers have surplus energy to sell, meaning that their energy consumption must not exceed their production capacity. The second rule ensures that prosumers assume that their energy production is the best possible, so that shortages and cuts do not occur. To enforce these rules, participating prosumers may be liable for financial penalties and the loss of collective reimbursements for losses.
The game system takes into account three types of prosumers: those who only have a renewable energy source, such as a photovoltaic system or a wind turbine; participants with battery energy storage systems (BESS); and those that depend on both photovoltaic energy and batteries. The game also includes system size and prosumer load, among other parameters.
“In the methodological part of the work, a strict theoretical analysis has been provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system in terms of: (1) guaranteeing economic equity among coalition members; and (2) ensure that each coalition member can be more profitable in P2P energy trading compared to the situation where it does not join the coalition,” the researchers explain.
After providing a series of equations to prove the aforementioned theorems, the researchers moved on to verify them. To do this, they performed numerical simulations in MATLAB. Solar radiation and electrical load data were taken from real Australian records, and P2P energy trading was performed at a 1-hour interval.
“The areas of the solar panels at the prosumer sites were randomly set between 10 m2 and 20 m2, and the energy conversion efficiencies of the solar panels were randomly set between 30% and 40%,” the researchers explained. . “The energy capacities of the prosumer BESSs are randomly set in the range of 4 kWh – 5 kWh and the initial state-of-charge levels of the BESSs are set in the range of 30% – 50%.”
To evaluate the impact of uncertainty on the prosumer coalition, the research group created a simulation of 100 prosumers and compared their behavior in a system with and without coalition rules established to reduce risks. While in the case with rules, the coalitions income increases as more members join, in the case without rules it sometimes decreases.
The group considered coalitions with 10 and 50 prosumers and the simulation showed that their collective profits increased by 33.55% and 35.67%, respectively, compared to a system without cooperation. The researchers then studied the impact of four parameters on the collective benefit: the amount of energy stored in the BESS, the power load of the prosumers, the size of the solar panels, and the relative error between the predicted net power values. and real.
“The figures clearly show that the collective benefits of the P2P energy trading system increase with the increase in the number of prosumers, the amount of energy stored in the BESS and the size of the solar panel. Collective benefits decrease with the increase in the energy load of prosumers,” they emphasize.
“When the prosumers predicted net power is lower than the actual power, the decrease in the ratio between stored energy and produced energy means that prosumers sell a small amount of energy to consumers, causing the remuneration of consumers to decrease. prosumers,” they add. “When the prosumers predicted net power is greater than the actual net power, increasing the ratio of stored energy to produced energy will result in a higher default cost; As a result, the payoff of prosumers will decrease.”
The coalition game and its analysis were presented in “ Uncertainty-aware prosumer coalitional game for peer-to-peer energy trading in community microgrids ” , published in International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems . The research was carried out by scientists from Sichuan Normal University, Chongqing University, Zhejiang Institute of Industry and Information Technology and the Australian University of Sydney. |
