Community-Based Transactive Coordination Mechanism for Enabling Grid-Edge Systems

The changing landscape of the electricity industry, characterized by a surge in distributed energy resources (DERs) and proactive customers, necessitates practical solutions for coordinated operation especially at the distribution-level. This paper introduces a community-based transactive coordination mechanism designed to incentivize customers for providing localized and system-level services reflected through real-time prices. The work presents a bidding approach for communities, representing collectives of customers, to formulate their price-responsiveness for retail energy coordination, emphasizing a community-centric model. By sending bidding curves to a third-party, the mechanism enables customers with DER assets to actively participate in localized coordination with the Load Serving Entity (LSE), supplementing each other's and even the utility's needs through a shared energy economy. The proposed transactive mechanism is implemented leveraging a co-simulation framework that integrates a distribution grid simulator with control agents for performance evaluation. Simulation-based evaluation on a real distribution system use-case, in collaboration with a local utility, demonstrate the potential of the mechanism to reduce energy costs up to 12% for communities with DERs like solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery energy storage systems (BESS). The mechanism's effectiveness is further validated through field tests conducted on a utility's real system, utilizing a 1.32 MWh battery resource.