Determining the effects of different market mechanisms on the power flow of a prosumer building

Abstract

With distributed energy sources becoming prominent, it is expected that new market mechanisms would become necessary to overcome the issues caused by the intermittency of those sources. This research determines the effect of certain market mechanisms, which have been proposed to either incentivize the distributed generation or to reduce their undesirable effects, on power flow of a prosumer household. The prosumer household was assumed to consist of PV generation system, an Electric Vehicle which was capable of V2G and a household battery. The market mechanisms used were Feed-in tariffs, Capacity Mechanism and Frequency Containment Reserve. An Energy Management System which determines both, the optimal system size and the optimal power flow by minimizing the operational costs was used to achieve this. It was observed that different level of feed in tariff affected the optimal system size and the power flow. At high feed-in tariff, the system size was the largest and high grid peak power was observed. Furthermore, the introduction of the capacity mechanism in the form of capacity tariffs per kW led to reduction in grid power consumption and feeding in. Finally, it was observed that the energy management system was able to reserve power for the frequency regulation market. Compared to an uncontrolled case, a reduction of 70.26% in total costs was achieved when the EMS control was introduced. A cost reduction of 52.02% compared to the uncontrolled case was achieved when an additional capacity tariff was also introduced to the control. Finally, introduction of the frequency regulation mechanism in the EMS control led to even further reduction in costs with a drop of 1205.07% compared to the uncontrolled case.