Equitable Transactive Market Design to Coordinate Networked Microgrids with Mixed Ownership

This paper presents an inter-microgrid peer-to-peer (P2P) transactive market mechanism to support the coordination of multiple microgrids in a mixed-ownership environment, while enabling prosumers to actively participate in the market to get their own benefits. An equitable P2P transactive energy market is designed, in which the energy burden to customers within microgrids is fairly distributed by leveraging a peer-to-peer communication network among MG owners and the distribution system operator (DSO). To reach the market settlement, a consensus-based distributed optimization algorithm is introduced to enable each MG owner and the DSO to distributedly determine the cleared price which is compensated by a household-income-based discount factor to encourage the energy-burden equity among customers in networked microgrids service territory. Numerical results on the modified 123 node test feeder including 6 microgrids are used to demonstrate the introduced equitable transactive energy market concept.

I. Introduction

Typically used to aggregate collections of DERs, microgrids (MG) are increasingly considered as a promising technology to support the integration of DERs into the distribution power networks [1]. When there are multiple microgrids and available communication/control capability, it is possible to coordinate the operations of networks of microgrids [2]. As the power systems evolve, there will be an increasing numbers of stake-holders/communities. As such, a service territory with multiple microgrids will have multiple owners including both utility and non-utility. However, in such a mixed ownership environment, it is not possible to connect all the non-utility microgrids to the utility Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) to allow for a centralized controller to collect information from and send command signal to all microgrids. Therefore, the SCADA-based centralized approach is not feasible to coordinate the operations of networked microgrids with mixed ownership, and a new approach is needed.