Online Pricing for Efficient Renewable Energy Sharing in a Sustainable Microgrid

With the development of distributed energy generators and storages, the sustainability of a microgrid comprised of multiple electricity users is significantly increased. Maximizing the efficiency of generated renewable energy is vital to running a sustainable microgrid as it indicates reducing the usage of thermal electricity purchased from the macrogrid. To this end, the excessive renewable energy of a user should be shared with others who are short of energy. Unfortunately, coordinating the transfers of renewable energy among the users in a microgrid is particularly difficult, given the rational nature of users, the stochastic nature of renewable energy and the dynamic nature of energy demand of each user. In this paper, we consider the coupled problem of maximizing the renewable energy efficiency of a sustainable microgrid as well as stimulating rational users to share excessive renewable energy. We propose a near-optimal scheduling algorithm, which determines the amounts of renewable energy transferred among users in an online fashion. We also design an efficient pricing mechanism for the trade of energy among users based on double auction. We rigorously prove that our online scheduling algorithm is approximately optimal and the pricing mechanism guarantees the property of individual rationality of users. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of our online algorithm and incentive mechanism.