Game-Based Optimal Aggregation of Energy Prosumer Community With Mixed-Pricing Scheme in Two-Settlement Electricity Market

In this paper, we consider an electricity market with a batch of energy prosumers (EPs), who can trade energy with the day-ahead market (DAM) and energy balancing market (EBM). To coordinate the behavior of EPs, an energy aggregator (EA) is established, who is responsible for making aggregation strategies for the EPs to improve the benefit of the whole EP community. Specifically, two pricing schemes are provided by the EA: pay-as-you-go (PAYG) scheme and lump sum (LS) scheme, which can be flexibly selected by EPs based on their own preferences. By considering the dual-pricing principle of the EBM, a stochastic Stackelberg game between the EPs and EA is formulated and a two-level optimization algorithm is introduced based on the proposed feasible region partitioning (FRP) method. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated with a two-settlement market model in the simulation.Note to Practitioners—This work aims to optimize the social cost of an EP community in a two-settlement electricity market. In contrast to the existing works, the main innovations and the resulting challenges lie in both the market modelling and the theoretical approach. In particular, different from the existing uniform-pricing schemes, this work explores the realization of mixed-pricing scheme, which can introduce more customized factors into the decision-making process of EPs. In addition, to adapt to a wider range of practical EBMs, the dual-pricing principle of the balancing energy is considered, which leads to a stochastic Stackelberg game where the social cost function is nondeterministic with respect to the strategy of EA. To address the aforementioned challenges, a two-level optimization algorithm is introduced based on the proposed FRP method, which enriches the existing methods for Stackelberg games. The proposed market model can be more capable of addressing some practical issues in the sense that the mixed-pricing scheme can adapt to the different preferences of market participants and the self-centric instinct of EPs is considered based on Nash games. In addition, the dual-pricing principle of the EBM is motivated by many real electricity markets and can be more general than the single-pricing counterpart.