Smart Grid Challenges for Electricity Retailers

Abstract

The need to achieve sustainability is driving a major transformation of the energy sector. The traditional top-down approach to electricity supply and grid management is being strongly disrupted by a range of forces including distributed renewables, retail market liberalization, and the need for energy consumers to adapt their behavior to the availability of renewable energy sources. We introduce Power TAC, a competitive simulation that challenges researchers to build autonomous trading agents that tackle the complex decision processes a retailer will need to face in future competitive retail electricity markets.