Power networks are undergoing a fundamental transition, with traditionally passive consumers becoming 'prosumers' -proactive consumers with distributed energy resources, actively managing their consumption, production and storage of energy. A key question that remains unresolved is, how can we incentivise coordination between vast numbers of distributed energy resources, each with different owners and characteristics? Virtual power plants and peer-to-peer energy trading offer different sources of value to prosumers and the power network and have been proposed as different potential structures for future prosumer electricity markets. In this Perspective, we argue they can be combined to capture the benefits of both. We thus propose the concept of the federated power plant, a virtual power plant formed through peer-to-peer transactions between self-organising prosumers. This addresses social, institutional and economic issues faced by top-down strategies for coordinating virtual power plants, while unlocking additional value for peer-to-peer energy trading.

This paper proposes bilateral contract networks as a new scalable market design for peer-to-peer energy trading. Coordinating small-scale distributed energy resources to shape overall demand could offer significant value to power systems, by alleviating the need for investments in upstream generation and transmission infrastructure, increasing network efficiency and increasing energy security. However, incentivising coordination between the owners of large-scale and smallscale energy resources at different levels of the power system remains an unsolved challenge. This paper introduces real-time and forward markets, consisting of energy contracts offered between generators with fuel-based sources, suppliers acting as intermediaries and consumers with inflexible loads, timecoupled flexible loads and/or renewable sources. For each type of agent, utility-maximising preferences for real-time contracts and forward contracts are derived. It is shown that these preferences satisfy full substitutability conditions essential for establishing the existence of a stable outcome-an agreed network of contracts specifying energy trades and prices, which agents do not wish to mutually deviate from. Important characteristics of energy trading are incorporated, including upstream-downstream energy balance and forward market uncertainty. Full substitutability ensures a distributed price-adjustment process can be used, which only requires local agent decisions and agent-to-agent communication between trading partners.

This paper proposes a peer-to-peer energy market platform based on the new concept of multi-class energy management, to coordinate trading between prosumers with heterogeneous (i.e. beyond purely financial) preferences. Power networks are undergoing a fundamental transition, with traditionally passive distribution network consumers becoming 'prosumers'; proactive consumers that actively manage their production and consumption of energy. The paper introduces the new concept of energy classes, allowing energy to be treated as a heterogeneous product, based on attributes of its source which are perceived by prosumers to have value. Examples include generation technology, location in the network and owner's reputation. The proposed peer-to-peer energy market platform coordinates trading between subscribed prosumers and the wholesale electricity market, to minimise costs associated with losses and battery depreciation, while providing added value by accounting for the prosumers' individual preferences for the source/destination of the energy they consume/produce. The decomposable structure of the multi-class energy management problem is exploited to devise a distributed price-directed optimisation mechanism, providing scalability and prosumer data privacy. Receding horizon model predictive control allows the prosumers to adjust their planned power flows based on the wholesale energy price, and up-to-date renewable generation and load predictions.

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This paper introduces a decentralized market design, which allows a distribution system operator to manage local demand constraints by obtaining flexibility from competing aggregators, which must in-turn incentivize prosumers to provide this flexibility. The novel networked market structure accounts for distribution system operator-to-aggregator and aggregatorto-prosumer ICT infrastructure and contractual arrangements, which may limit which participants can negotiate transactions with one another. The proposed flexibility market is opt-in for prosumers, which continue to obtain energy within the existing retail electricity market. At the same time, it is underpinned by bilateral energy transactions, and could be integrated into future peer-to-peer electricity markets. Through the market, the distribution system operator, aggregators and prosumers reach agreement on a stable outcome -a set of individually beneficial transactions no group wishes to mutually deviate from. Market outcomes also satisfy Pareto efficiency, meaning that it is not possible to make a participant better off, without making another worse off.

Peer-to-peer trading in energy networks is expected to be exclusively conducted by the prosumers of the network with negligible influence from the grid. This raises the critical question: how can enough prosumers be encouraged to participate in peer-to-peer trading so as to make its operation sustainable and beneficial to the overall electricity network? To this end, this paper proposes how a motivational psychology framework can be used effectively to design peer-to-peer energy trading to increase user participation. To do so, first, the state-of-the-art of peer-to-peer energy trading literature is discussed by following a systematic classification, and gaps in existing studies are identified. Second, a motivation psychology framework is introduced, which consists of a number of motivational models that a prosumer needs to satisfy before being convinced to participate in energy trading. Third, a game-theoretic peer-to-peer energy trading scheme is developed, its relevant properties are studied, and it is shown that the coalition among different prosumers is a stable coalition. Fourth, through numerical case studies, it is shown that the proposed model can reduce carbon emissions by 18.38% and 9.82% in a single day in Summer and Winter respectively compared to a feed-in-tariff scheme. The proposed scheme is also shown to reduce the cost of energy up to 118 ¢ and 87 ¢ per day in Summer and Winter respectively. Finally, how the outcomes of the scheme satisfy all the motivational psychology models is discussed, which subsequently shows its potential to attract users to participate in energy trading.

This paper proposes dynamic energy level balancing between distributed storage devices as a strategy to improve frequency regulation and reliability in droop controlled microgrids. This has been achieved with a distributed multi-agent cooperative control system which modifies the output power of droop controlled storage devices so that they reach a balanced energy state. As the storage devices approach a common energy level they are able to contribute their full power capacity to deal with generation and demand fluctuations in the microgrid. The cooperative control system also provides secondary frequency control, restoring the microgrid to the reference frequency. Simulations have been completed showing that the cooperative control system improves frequency regulation compared to traditional droop control strategies when the storage devices begin at different energy levels and the microgrid experiences generation or demand variability. A control input saturation constraint has been developed which ensures that the cooperative control system will not overload the storage devices.Index Terms-Battery energy storage systems (BESS), distributed cooperative control, microgrid, multi-agent systems.