Energy trading schemes for consumers : transitioning from wholesale markets to peer-to-peer transactions

Abstract

With concerns about environment, climate and sustainability, the use of intermittent renewable resources like photovoltaics (PVs) and wind energy are growing enormously. Uses of smart power devices, energy storages (ES), electric vehicles (EVs) and other distributed energy resources (DER) are also on rise. As intermittent DER penetration becomes higher, the uncertainty increases in the electricity grid which creates technical and economic problems. To mitigate this uncertainty and resulting issues, consumers can utilize demand response (DR) by providing DR service at wholesale market and retail market. Further, not only DRs can be utilized but also DERs such as ES and PVs can be deployed from the consumer side at wholesale market as well as distribution side transactive energy market (TEM). In this thesis, we propose the trading schemes for consumers in the electricity market. The study includes the consumers’ bidding mechanisms for traditional day-ahead wholesale electricity market, price-based market approach and transactive energy market (peer-to-peer energy market in particular). Further, the retail market and existing wholesale market could also accommodate more consumers in the existing market framework or with some modifications. Likewise, consumers are not only using electrical energy but also other forms of energies such as heat and gas energy. With advent of modern heating and generation devices, the intertwining of these energy vectors (i.e. heat, electricity and gas) do exist at significant level at both generation and consumer end. In this context, we have proposed the trading schemes for consumers having multi-energy system (MES) resources such as hybrid heating system and gas-energy storage system. These consumers having MES could participate in electricity market ranging from wholesale market to the peer-to-peer (P2P) market. Finally, this thesis shows that there is a need for the current electricity market framework to have a transition towards the transactive energy market framework where consumers have greater role in the operation of the electricity network. The transactive energy market could have a coexistence of wholesale, retail, distribution level market and P2P markets. While this transition is well agreed upon in the literatures, new innovative trading schemes are required for greater consumer participation. We have proposed novel trading and pricing mechanisms for P2P market as well as existing wholesale market for better consumer participation as prosumers.