Utility-driven renewable energy sharing systems for community microgrid

Abstract

Community microgrid has become a popular platform for managing renewable energy in power distribution networks. However, due to the intermittency of renewable energy, the unbalanced energy supply and demand in community microgrid has become an urgent problem. To solve the problem, this paper develops a grid and renewable energy sharing system, which consists of pricing and allocation stages. Specifically, we first propose a game theoretic pricing approach to explore an optimal energy price. With the obtained optimal price, the utility of community microgrid users is maximized. We then transform the energy allocation problem into a convex optimization by derivative analysis, and design an energy allocation method based on a water filling algorithm to solve the convex optimization problem. Experimental results show that as compare to benchmarking methods, our proposed electric energy sharing system can reduce the buyers’ energy cost by up to 46.2% and increase the sellers’ energy profit by up to 62.5%.