A Crowdsourcing Renewable Energy Delivery Framework with Dynamic Pricing and Routing Policy

Abstract

Electric trucks (ETs) possess large-capacity batteries and are widely adopted in express industry. The rapid development of battery technologies and discharging facilities endows ETs with another role as temporary mobile energy storage (MES) to deliver energy and feed energy back to grid at charging stations. Thus, widespread ETs have great potential to relieve load pressure on transmission lines of the grid and assist the grid to allocate energy. By assuming that energy couriers (ECs, couriers with ETs) can be recruited through cloud platform, surplus renewable energy (RE) harvested at renewable energy plants (REPs) can be delivered to charging stations deployed at limited-capacity feeders by couriers who take the energy delivery orders. Existing works focus more on centralized energy delivery scheme based on utility-owned MES and it is not economical and robust due to extra labor cost and the RE generation uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a crowdsourcing RE delivery framework with coordination of express network. To improve the economy of the delivery system, RE delivery is crowdsourced to individual courier. Additional RE delivery for couriers can inflict extra cost (charging and discharging time, detouring, etc.) compared with the original express tasks and couriers are stimulated to participate in the RE delivery by a pricing and routing policy based on contract theory. To deal with the uncertainties and enhance the robustness, the policy is dynamically updated according to real-time observation values of system status utilizing Lyapunov Optimization. Simulation results on California highway dataset demonstrate the long-term effectiveness of the proposed dynamic policy.