A Hierarchical Energy Sharing Strategy for Multi-Communities with Heterogeneous Prosumers

Inter-community energy sharing is of positive significance in the energy transacion market, which can effectively reduce the cost of purchasing energy from the utility grid and improve the local consumption of renewable energy. In this study, a hierarchical energy sharing framework for multi-communities with heterogeneous prosumers is proposed. Each community consists of different types of prosumers, that is, photovoltaic (PV) prosumers, wind turbine (WT) prosumers and aggregate electric vehicle (EV) prosumers. A hierarchical energy sharing strategy based on Stackelberg game is proposed. In the inner cooperation stage, the total cost minimization model of operator cluster is established. In the outer non-cooperative stage, the Stackelberg game model between each operator and heterogeneous prosumers in each community is established, and the robust optimization method is adopted to solve the time-varying uncertainty problem of renewable energy generations. A hierarchical iterative algorithm is designed to solve the Stackelberg game equilibrium strategy, which maximizes each prosumer's income and minimizes the operators' total cost. The simulation results show that the proposed multi-community hierarchical energy sharing strategy can not only reduce the impact of load fluctuation on the utility grid, but also improve the income of prosumers.