Capacity allocation and pricing for energy storage sharing in a smart community

The increasing energy storage resources at the end-user side require an efficient market mechanism to facilitate and improve the utilization of energy storage (ES). Here, a novel ES capacity trading framework is proposed for ES sharing of a smart community consisting of multiple ES owners (ESOs) and users. Specifically, an iterative clearing approach is designed to capture the interaction between the ESOs and users. Players submit trading parameters with consideration of their own preferences and profiles according to utility functions. After receiving the offering/bidding parameters, the market operator determines the capacity allocation and clearing price based on the principle of maximizing social welfare. This decentralized clearing process avoids complex calculation induced by the centralized decision method and preserves players' privacy. Case studies are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The results show that ES sharing scheme brings additional revenues to ESOs, decreases costs for users, and reduces the peak-to-valley difference of system loads. In addition, the clearing results are very close to global optimal solutions and mainly affected by the maximum capacity and reservation price of each ESO.