234 research outputs found
Noncooperative Games for Autonomous Consumer Load Balancing Over Smart Grid
Traditionally, most consumers of electricity pay for their consumption according to a fixed-rate. The few existing implementations of real time pricing have been restricted to large industrial consumers, where the benefits could justify the high implementation cost. With the advancement of Smart Grid technologies, large scale implementation of variable-rate metering will be more practical. Consumers will be able to control their electricity consumption in an automated fashion, where one possible scheme is to have each individual maximize their own utility as a noncooperative game. In this thesis, noncooperative games are formulated among the consumers of Smart Grid with two real-time pricing schemes, where the Nash equilibrium operation points are investigated for their uniqueness and load balancing properties. The first pricing scheme charges a price according to the average cost of electricity borne by the retailer and the second charges according to a time-variant increasing-block price. The zero revenue model and the constant revenue rate model, are the two revenue models being considered. The relationship between these games and certain congestion games, known as atomic flow games from the computer networking community, is demonstrated. It is shown that the proposed noncooperative game formulation falls under the class of atomic splittable flow games. It is shown that the Nash equilibrium exists for four different cases, with different pricing schemes and revenue models, and is shown to be unique for three of the cases, under certain conditions. It is shown that both pricing schemes lead to similar electricity loading patterns when consumers are interested only in the minimization of electricity costs. Finally, the conditions under which the increasing-block pricing scheme is preferred over the average cost based pricing scheme are discussed
Integrating Energy Storage into the Smart Grid: A Prospect Theoretic Approach
In this paper, the interactions and energy exchange decisions of a number of
geographically distributed storage units are studied under decision-making
involving end-users. In particular, a noncooperative game is formulated between
customer-owned storage units where each storage unit's owner can decide on
whether to charge or discharge energy with a given probability so as to
maximize a utility that reflects the tradeoff between the monetary transactions
from charging/discharging and the penalty from power regulation. Unlike
existing game-theoretic works which assume that players make their decisions
rationally and objectively, we use the new framework of prospect theory (PT) to
explicitly incorporate the users' subjective perceptions of their expected
utilities. For the two-player game, we show the existence of a proper mixed
Nash equilibrium for both the standard game-theoretic case and the case with PT
considerations. Simulation results show that incorporating user behavior via PT
reveals several important insights into load management as well as economics of
energy storage usage. For instance, the results show that deviations from
conventional game theory, as predicted by PT, can lead to undesirable grid
loads and revenues thus requiring the power company to revisit its pricing
schemes and the customers to reassess their energy storage usage choices.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, conferenc
Smart Microgrids: Overview and Outlook
The idea of changing our energy system from a hierarchical design into a set
of nearly independent microgrids becomes feasible with the availability of
small renewable energy generators. The smart microgrid concept comes with
several challenges in research and engineering targeting load balancing,
pricing, consumer integration and home automation. In this paper we first
provide an overview on these challenges and present approaches that target the
problems identified. While there exist promising algorithms for the particular
field, we see a missing integration which specifically targets smart
microgrids. Therefore, we propose an architecture that integrates the presented
approaches and defines interfaces between the identified components such as
generators, storage, smart and \dq{dumb} devices.Comment: presented at the GI Informatik 2012, Braunschweig Germany, Smart Grid
Worksho
Managing Price Uncertainty in Prosumer-Centric Energy Trading: A Prospect-Theoretic Stackelberg Game Approach
In this paper, the problem of energy trading between smart grid prosumers,
who can simultaneously consume and produce energy, and a grid power company is
studied. The problem is formulated as a single-leader, multiple-follower
Stackelberg game between the power company and multiple prosumers. In this
game, the power company acts as a leader who determines the pricing strategy
that maximizes its profits, while the prosumers act as followers who react by
choosing the amount of energy to buy or sell so as to optimize their current
and future profits. The proposed game accounts for each prosumer's subjective
decision when faced with the uncertainty of profits, induced by the random
future price. In particular, the framing effect, from the framework of prospect
theory (PT), is used to account for each prosumer's valuation of its gains and
losses with respect to an individual utility reference point. The reference
point changes between prosumers and stems from their past experience and future
aspirations of profits. The followers' noncooperative game is shown to admit a
unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (NE) under classical game theory (CGT)
which is obtained using a fully distributed algorithm. The results are extended
to account for the case of PT using algorithmic solutions that can achieve an
NE under certain conditions. Simulation results show that the total grid load
varies significantly with the prosumers' reference point and their
loss-aversion level. In addition, it is shown that the power company's profits
considerably decrease when it fails to account for the prosumers' subjective
perceptions under PT
Charging Games in Networks of Electrical Vehicles
In this paper, a static non-cooperative game formulation of the problem of
distributed charging in electrical vehicle (EV) networks is proposed. This
formulation allows one to model the interaction between several EV which are
connected to a common residential distribution transformer. Each EV aims at
choosing the time at which it starts charging its battery in order to minimize
an individual cost which is mainly related to the total power delivered by the
transformer, the location of the time interval over which the charging
operation is performed, and the charging duration needed for the considered EV
to have its battery fully recharged. As individual cost functions are assumed
to be memoryless, it is possible to show that the game of interest is always an
ordinal potential game. More precisely, both an atomic and nonatomic versions
of the charging game are considered. In both cases, equilibrium analysis is
conducted. In particular, important issues such as equilibrium uniqueness and
efficiency are tackled. Interestingly, both analytical and numerical results
show that the efficiency loss due to decentralization (e.g., when cost
functions such as distribution network Joule losses or life of residential
distribution transformers when no thermal inertia is assumed) induced by
charging is small and the corresponding "efficiency", a notion close to the
Price of Anarchy, tends to one when the number of EV increases.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, keywords: Charging games - electrical vehicle -
distribution networks - potential games - Nash equilibrium - price of anarch
Electric vehicle as a service (EVaaS):applications, challenges and enablers
Under the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) concept, electric vehicles (EVs) can be deployed as loads to absorb excess production or as distributed energy resources to supply part of their stored energy back to the grid. This paper overviews the technologies, technical components and system requirements needed for EV deployment. Electric vehicle as a service (EVaaS) exploits V2G technology to develop a system where suitable EVs within the distribution network are chosen individually or in aggregate to exchange energy with the grid, individual customers or both. The EVaaS framework is introduced, and interactions among EVaaS subsystems such as EV batteries, charging stations, loads and advanced metering infrastructure are studied. The communication infrastructure and processing facilities that enable data and information exchange between EVs and the grid are reviewed. Different strategies for EV charging/discharging and their impact on the distribution grid are reviewed. Several market designs that incentivize energy trading in V2G environments are discussed. The benefits of V2G are studied from the perspectives of ancillary services, supporting of renewables and the environment. The challenges to V2G are studied with respect to battery degradation, energy conversion losses and effects on distribution system
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