Blockchain-Aided Cooperative Market Offering for Distributed Renewable Energy Producers

Yukai Wang, Qisheng Huang, Long Shi, Zhe Wang, Shaoyong Guo, Hao Wang

Abstract: Distributed renewable energy (DRE) systems, such as solar panels, wind turbines, and small-scale hydroelectric systems, are increasingly participating in electricity markets. The unpredictable nature of renewable energy imposes a significant impact on the strategic offering decisions of DRE producers in two-settlement electricity markets. Furthermore, small-scale DRE producers face challenges, such as minimum size threshold requirements, that prevent them from participating in wholesale electricity markets. Driven by these issues, this work proposes a blockchain-aided coalitional game framework to enable the cooperative renewable offering strategies of distributed producers, wherein these producers are incentivized to form a grand coalition to participate in electricity markets and share real-time balancing risks. Moreover, it is verified that the grand coalition is optimal for maximizing the total profit of the producers, indicating the benefit of cooperation. It is challenging to obtain the core of the coalition due to the huge computational complexity. Nevertheless, a closed-form profit allocation mechanism is constructed and proved to be in the core of the coalition. This indicates that none of these producers has an incentive to leave the grand coalition. Furthermore, we design a smart contract to automate the coalition formation and profit allocation processes of DRE producers on the blockchain. Finally, numerical studies are conducted to validate the established theoretical results. Simulation results show that the proposed approach increases individual utility for all participants and improves the system's overall profit by up to 9.4% compared with the independent baseline.

External IDs:doi:10.1109/tnse.2025.3638785