Profit Allocation in Renewables Based Community Microgrids with Aggregation and Self-Sufficiency

Peer-to-peer (p2p) electricity exchange can reduce energy wastage and improve capacity utilization in microgrids with renewable energy based electricity production. In such microgrids, called community microgrids, an important problem is to enable customers to share and transact their energy in a rational and acceptable manner. In this paper, electricity exchanges are modeled using co-operative game-theoretic concepts. We assume that all the participants of a community microgrid, which is connected to an external grid, co-operate to form a single (grand) coalition. Using the concept of marginal contributions (MC), we had previously proposed a fair methodology to distribute the total profits of the coalition among its participants. Here, we extend the methodology by considering two scenarios. First, we analyze the case where the community microgrid sometimes collectively produces more electricity than its total load and sells this excess production to an aggregator. Secondly, we consider self-sufficiency as an important objective of the community microgrid. We then use MC to derive a new, simple, and scalable allocation formula to distribute the profits among the participants fairly. To demonstrate our methodology, we applied it to a microgrid in Austin, Texas, USA. The newly proposed methodology saved ≈4.55% as compared to the old originally proposed methodology.