Energy Trading in the Smart Stability Network

Abstract

The current implementation of the electrical grid has not changed since the last 50 years and due to the increase of energy demand the stability of the electrical grid is strongly affected which can result in power cuts respectively blackouts, brownouts or poor quality. One of the main reasons of these issues is the current design of the electrical grid, which is designed for centralized power production in big power plants from where the customers are served with electrical energy. In the case that one of these power plans has an outage, the impact is huge because it could affect several major cities or worse, e.g. the Northeast blackout of 2003. This paper proposes an approach to improve the stability of the electrical grid through decentralized networks and energy trading. The idea is to decrease the deviation from the schedule of the power plant operators and to create an economic incentive for homeowners. This is achieved by tradable goods, which are traded in such a network. This paper presents a model of a decentralized network, which consists of several smart houses with data taken from real consumers. The model or rather trading process is implemented with the multiagent framework JADE that allows implementing a distributed network with different type of participants. The trading process works in a way that a leader is elected in the beginning of the process. Once the leader is elected, all other participants inform the leader in short time intervals about their energy demands and their offers. An offer corresponding here to a tradable good such as receiving energy from a photovoltaic system, storing energy in a battery or switching on a boiler. In each interval, respectively cycle, the leader calculates the deviation from the schedule according to the schedule and the energy demands of the participants. When the deviation from the schedule is greater than zero, the leader looks for the best offers to decrease the deviation. Hereby, a participant gets paid when the leader accepts its offer. According to the findings and results in this thesis, it is feasible to improve the stability of the electrical grid and to create an economic incentive for homeowners. While smart houses with a battery help to reduce the deviation from the schedule immensely, introduce smart houses with a photovoltaic system fluctuation and therefore increase the deviation. On the other side, smart houses with a photovoltaic system get more profit than houses with a battery because the produced energy of photovoltaic system has to be used at any price. Although, this thesis shows that energy trading can improve the stability of the electrical grid and create an economic incentive for homeowners at the same time. A concrete business model is missing, which describes how such a decentralized network can be introduced and sold to homeowners. Furthermore the simplifications of the energy demand forecast function and the leader election in this thesis are to be considered.