A Distributed Game Theoretic Approach for Optimal Battery Use in an Energy Community

With the recent rise of decentralized energy resources like solar panels and batteries, energy communities have grown in popularity. Without collaborative load management, some of the locally produced electricity in the energy community could be unused and sold back to the grid, hindering its economic and environmental benefits. In this paper, we introduce a game to model an energy community with a shared energy source and to determine how to distribute the generated electricity. The goal is to compute a Nash equilibrium so that no participant has an incentive to leave the community. To do so with minimal information sharing between members, a distributed approach is considered. The game structure should incentivize self-consumption in the energy community. We then integrate the game in a receding horizon control framework. This approach is tested on real photovoltaic data and reduces costs for the energy community. Its robustness to imperfect solar forecasting is also evaluated, showing that uncertainty induces minimal increases in cost.