Decentralised Energy Market for Implementation into the Intergrid Concept - Part I: Isolated System

Power systems world-wide are currently undergoing unprecedented change as the global energy mix transitions from primarily fossil-fuel based synchronous generation towards utility-scale and distributed renewable energy generation. This paper explores the rationale for the pursuit of alternative network architectures to facilitate the transition towards high penetration levels of renewable energies. Furthermore, the emerging research field of transactive energy markets and their potential for energy price reductions is presented. The paper examines the intergrid architecture coupled with a decentralised transactive energy market as a mechanism for permitting higher levels of distributed generation and storage and for energy price reductions, with the Australian energy market used as a case study. The primary contributions of this paper are the development of a decentralised, peer-to-peer (P2P) transactive energy market (TEM) and the derivation of an autonomous agent algorithm capable of monitoring the internal states of agents to place bids and offers to the market accordingly. This paper (part 1 of 2) investigates the behaviour of the TEM and agent algorithm when applied to an isolated intergrid architecture level. The simulation results contained here-within demonstrate that the decentralised TEM and distributed agent algorithm operate in accordance with the desired fundamental principles of economics (supply vs demand), with the potential for significant retail energy price reductions and higher levels of renewable energies.