An Innovative Coalitional Trading Model for a Biomass Power Plant Paired With Green Energy Resources

Abstract

The role of biomass resources to diminish the dependency on fossil fuels is steadily increasing worldwide. More importantly, governments set goals to boost the share of renewable energy resources in the power sector to face up to global warming issues. In this paper, a coalitional game model for the trading of a Biomass Power Plant (BPP) paired with a concentrating solar power facility and a wind park is proposed. In the proposed coalitional trading architecture, the physical coupling between biomass and concentrating solar power facilities is embedded, while cost sources related to operation and maintenance of all units as well as harvesting and transportation of forestry residue are taken into account to represent a more pragmatic trading approach. The suggested coalitional trading model is formulated as a stochastic model with three sequential stages. Moreover, game theory concepts, i.e., <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\tau$</tex-math></inline-formula> -value, nucleolus, and Shapley-value, are exploited and compared for profit allocation to the coalition members. A cost-benefit analysis is also conducted to investigate the effect of cooperative and non-cooperative trading models on the BPP’s investment feasibility. The results highlight the lucrativeness of the proposed coalitional trading model and remarkable reduction in the payback period of the BPP under a cooperative game framework.