Transactive Energy Based Aggregation of Prosumers as a Retailer

The rapid growth of distributed energy resources results in the proliferation of prosumers at the distribution level, who can both produce and consume energy. In order to harvest benefits of aggregation to obtain revenues in wholesale market and encourage direct interactions among prosumers and other flexible players at the same time, this paper proposes an aggregation framework for prosumers based on transactive energy, in which prosumers aggregate and trade in an independent, proactive and privacy-preserved manner without relying on a real central entity, while other flexible players could be benefited equally. The aggregation of prosumers as a whole behaves as a retailer that trades in wholesale market and towards end-users in retail market. Therefore, the problem is generalized as a bi-level multi-leader multi-follower game in which prosumers are leaders and end-users are followers. To realize the transactive energy based trading framework, an inner-outer iteration approach is proposed, where the outer iteration involves interactions among prosumers and end-users, and achieves final results including the retail price and optimal behaviors of all players. The inner iteration is conducted during each time of the outer iteration to solve end-users' optimal consuming profiles. The whole iteration process involves the independent decision makings of players, and only relies on exchange of information of retail price and prosumers' offers instead of players' private information. Case studies are then carried out demonstrating the proposed transactive energy based aggregation framework for prosumers could decrease the retail price, increase revenues for both prosumers and end-users, and reduce the peak load.