User-Centric Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Mechanisms for Residential Microgrids

With the increasing prevalence of distributed generation, energy trading in distribution side starts to attract academic attentions. This paper proposes two user-centric pricing strategies for facilitating peer-to-peer energy trading in residential microgrids: Unified Pricing (UP) strategy and Identified Pricing (IP) strategy. The proposed strategies aim to maximize the profit of small-scale distributed energy resources owners while taking into account the user's life convenience and solar photovoltaic uncertainty. UP strategy includes a centralized market pool that determines the market clearing price at a regular time interval; IP strategy identifies each energy transaction with difference on different time based on consumers' bid. The auction algorithm is used for solving the energy allocation to achieve best social welfare in the community microgrid. Numerical studies based on 15 simulated residential users are conducted to validate the reasonability and effectiveness of the proposed methods.