Distributed Solar Energy Sharing within Connected Communities: A Coalition Game Approach

As penetration of distributed energy resources such as rooftop photovoitaic (PV) increases, during certain hours of the day, power supplied by distributed generators is anticipated to exceed local consumption needs. This creates the potential to send power flows in the “reverse direction”, which may create a technical challenge for the grid. This paper proposes to examine how the transactive energy might help solve this challenge and also disrupt electricity markets. Specifically, we model an environment in which owners of distributed PV can sell their excess generation to their neighbors through a virtual community exchange. The PV energy sharing is modeled as a cooperative game, which also considers the demand response (DR) of energy trading prosumers. A simplified reward allocation mechanism is developed based on the Shapley value and marginal contributions to allocate the coalition revenue. The objective of the coalition game among multi-prosumers is to maximize the total welfare of these prosumers increase by joining the coalition. A case study with 50 houses (all having distributed PV) in Texas shows that the coalition with both PV sharing and DR could improve cost savings for all prosumers.