Distributed Real-Time Electricity Allocation Mechanism for Large Residential Microgrid

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, several incentives are given to use renewable energy sources (RES) and plug-in electrical vehicles (PEVs). By using PEVs for electricity storage and RES as distributed generators, microgrids (MG) become more reliable, stable, and cost-effective. However, the high intermittent nature of energy sources and unpredictable presence of PEV in the MG offers new technological challenges to the smart grid/MG energy management system (EMS). In this paper, we propose a new distributed real-time electricity allocation (DRTA) scheme for the smart grid/MG EMS whose objectives are to reduce the electricity bill of the residential customers, to increase the overall social benefit of smart MG/grid community, and to increase the energy efficiency and reliability of the MG to rely on locally generated electricity. We formulate the problem as a noncooperative game using mechanism design and solve it to optimality. The proposed DRTA scheme converges to an optimal Nash equilibrium and produces a near-optimal solution. We compare the proposed scheme with a centralized optimal electricity consumption scheme and to the solution obtained from unregulated (natural) scheduling framework.