Cooperative demand-side management scenario for the low-voltage network in liberalised electricity markets

This work presents a cooperative demand-side management (DSM) scenario in a low-voltage network considering a context of liberalised electricity markets. The authors show that introducing an additional inter-supplier cooperation mechanism among consumers enhances a better use of the flexibility consented by each individual, hence aiming at reaching a global optimum instead of optimising the costs of a few ones. To that end, a real-time pricing (RTP) scheme is explored based on cost functions differentiated in both time and consumption level that should reflect the true energy cost. The authors apply to each consumer a commodity cost function shared among the set of cooperative users of its respective supplier as well as one common network cost function shared by all cooperative users of all suppliers in the considered network. Each individual runs, through its smart meter (SM), a decentralised optimisation algorithm defining an energy consumption schedule for a set of flexible appliances (FAs). The mechanism the authors propose ensures that a fair cost distribution between all users is achieved by reaching the Nash equilibrium. To assess their proposition, they confront it to intermediate consumption strategies through a benchmark. The results confirm that their inter-supplier cooperation mechanism always leads to the minimum total cost.