Efficient Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Mechanisms with Unreliable Prosumers

Abstract

We model and analyze a peer-to-peer (p2p) energy trading market under uncertainty in the traded energy, in a setting with multiple sellers and buyers. A set of prosumers sell in the market their energy surplus units, which are subject to uncertainty for being actually available, while other prosumers buy energy to cover their deficit units, which are subject to uncertainty for being actually needed. Given the different levels of uncertainty of different prosumers and different energy units, the p2p trading problem is to match energy demand and supply and to specify the payments of buyers and compensations to sellers.We propose an innovative variant of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction customized to our setting, motivated by the properties of the standard form of the VCG auction, namely maximizing social welfare while ensuring participants' truthfulness. We determine the bidding profiles of players by considering the uncertainty in the declared amounts of energy surplus or deficit. Moreover, we develop a low-complexity allocation rule, that provably leads to maximization of the expected social welfare, where the expectation is with respect to uncertainties of energy units. We also derive closed-form expressions for winners' payments. We compare our mechanism to a double auction, which is currently used as a p2p trading mechanism. The results reveal that our mechanism outperforms the double auction one, and lead to interesting intuitions and guidelines that shed light into p2p energy market design. CCS CONCEPTS• Theory of computation → Computational pricing and auctions.

Social Shaping for Transactive Energy Systems

“…Consider a MTES with four agents, where the electricity supply available is a = (a 1 , a 2 , a 3 , a 4 ) = (5, 8, 7, 0) . (6,5,6,5). The social welfare equilibrium is computed by solving the optimization problem in (5), which yields x * = (5.12, 4.65, 5.41, 4.82) .…”

“…At the same time, transactive energy systems are being designed to coordinate supply and demand for various distributed energy sources in an electrical power network [5], where power lines (or cables) enable electricity exchanges, and communication channels enable cyber information exchanges. With transactive energy systems supporting the rise of the prosumer (i.e., an electricity producer and consumer), new ways are emerging to enable a fair [4] and sustainable renewable energy transition [6].…”