Transactive energy management for hydrogen-enabled community microgrids: A hierarchical Stackelberg game approach

Coordinating dispersed prosumer resources and balancing supply-demand variability are major challenges brought about by the growing use of renewable energy in community microgrids (MGs). Although hydrogen energy storage presents a promising long-term flexibility, its incorporation into market-based coordination frameworks is still restricted, especially when it comes to equilibrium-driven transactive energy systems. In order to facilitate the coordinated operation of hydrogen-enabled prosumers in community MGs, this paper suggests a hierarchical game-theoretic transactive energy framework. A Community Energy Manager (CEM) sets market-clearing prices while anticipating prosumer reactions in this bi-level Stackelberg game. The model is reformulated as a MPEC using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions of the prosumer-level optimization problems in order to guarantee mathematical rigor and computational tractability. Our approach is evaluated through comparative simulations against uncoordinated, fixed-price, and centralized benchmarks. In comparison to uncoordinated operation under the studied scenario, the proposed framework reduces grid energy dependency by up to 74.3% and total operational costs by roughly 26–32%. The equilibrium-based approach achieves performance close to centralized optimization (within 5–8% deviation) and increases cost efficiency by about 15% when compared to fixed-price transactive mechanisms. Hydrogen integration also makes it possible to reduce peak grid imports by up to 22%, underscoring its contribution to improving system resilience and flexibility in high-demand and low-renewable scenarios.