Direct Electricity Trading in Smart Grid: A Coalitional Game Analysis

Integration of distributed generation based on renewable energy sources into the power system has gained popularity in recent years. Many small-scale electricity suppliers (SESs) have recently entered the electricity market, which has been traditionally dominated by a few large-scale electricity suppliers. The emergence of SESs enables direct trading (DT) of electricity between SESs and end-users (EUs), without going through retailers, and promotes the possibility of improving the benefits to both parties. In this paper, the cooperation between SESs and EUs in DT is analyzed based on coalitional game theory. In particular, an electricity pricing scheme that achieves a fair division of revenue between SESs and EUs is analytically derived by using the asymptotic Shapley value. The asymptotic Shapley value is shown to be in the core of the coalitional game such that no group of SESs and EUs has an incentive to abandon the coalition, which implies the stable operation of DT for the proposed pricing scheme. Unlike the existing pricing schemes that typically require multiple stages of calculations and real time information about each participant, the electricity price for the proposed scheme can be determined instantaneously based on the number of participants in DT and statistical information about electricity supply and demand. Therefore, the proposed pricing scheme is suitable for practical implementation. Using computer simulations, the price of electricity for the proposed DT scheme is examined in various environments, and the numerical results validate the asymptotic analysis. Moreover, the revenues of the SESs and EUs are evaluated for various types of SESs and different numbers of participants in DT. The optimal ratio of different types of SESs is also investigated.