Aggregating distributed energy resources for grid flexibility services: A distributed game theoretic approach

We propose a hierarchical energy management scheme for aggregating Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) for grid flexibility services. To prevent a direct participation of numerous prosumers in the wholesale electricity market, aggregators, as self-interest agents in our scheme, incentivize prosumers to provide flexibility. We firstly model the economic behavior of aggregators and prosumers as a noncooperative aggregative game. Then a fully distributed algorithm in discrete time is proposed to find the corresponding Nash Equilibrium (NE). In this algorithm, each aggregator only needs to exchange its estimate of the aggregated flexibility and an auxiliary variable with its neighbors. Convergence of the algorithm is proven using operator theoretic techniques. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by a numerical case study.