On the Communication Topology Connectivity of Aggregating Distributed Energy Resources

With the development of the internet of things (IoT) technology, massive distributed energy resources (DERs) can be aggregated to improve the economy and reliability of power grids by sharing the surplus energy among a community. However, the peer-to-peer energy sharing requires a connected communication network, which might be costly. Therefore, this paper aims to address a public interest regarding the impacts of communication topology connectivity on the benefits of sharing DERs. In this paper, an energy sharing scheme is proposed considering communication topology, in which only those connected users are allowed to share DERs with each other. A connectivity matrix is presented to reflect the communication fashion among all the users. Then the energy sharing model is to minimize the total costs of all the users given a certain communication topology while respecting individual DER constraints. For practical implementation, a decentralized framework using alternating direction method of multipliers is adopted to protect users’ privacy. Case studies based on real-world datasets demonstrate the impacts of communication topology connectivity on energy sharing. Hopefully, the proposed model and method will provide useful references for constructing the IoT communication networks.