Load Profile Negotiation for Compliance with Power Limits in Day-Ahead Planning

The variability of electrical energy prices at the spot market incentivizes cost-optimized load scheduling. Based on day-ahead price forecasts, energy costs can be considerably reduced by shifting energy-intensive processes to times with lower energy prices. While the mechanism of the market match demand and supply, they currently do not consider technical limitations of the electrical power grid. A large number of consumers scheduling electrical loads according to the same price forecast could result in congestion in the transmission or distribution systems. We propose a mechanism for day-ahead scheduling that enables negotiation of load profiles between multiple consumers and an aggregator in compliance with overall power limits. We present two mechanisms for an aggregator without knowledge about internal details of the participants to achieve this goal and compare the performance to the results of a centralized scheduler with global knowledge.