Operationally-Safe Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading in Distribution Grids: A Game-Theoretic Market-Clearing Mechanism

In future distribution grids, prosumers (i.e., energy consumers with storage and/or production capabilities) will trade energy with each other and with the main grid. To ensure an efficient and safe operation of energy trading, in this paper, we formulate a peer-to-peer energy market of prosumers as a generalized aggregative game, in which a network operator is responsible to enforce the operational constraints of the system. We design a distributed market-clearing mechanism with convergence guarantee to an economically-efficient, strategically- stable, and operationally-safe configuration (i.e., a variational generalized Nash equilibrium). Numerical studies on the IEEE 37-bus testcase show the scalability of the proposed approach and suggest that active participation in the market is beneficial for both prosumers and the network operator.