Towards a self-organization mechanism for agent associations in electricity spot markets

Abstract

In the course of the last years, the liberalization of electricity markets induced the creation of power exchanges which allow participants to the trade electricityrelated products in a competitive manner. Yet, in today's market structures small-scale entities like photovoltaic plants or households are prevented from direct participation because of capacity-related barriers to entry. To address this problem, the following paper introduces a mechanism for self-organizing agents which allows actors to join forces by aggregating their generation and consumption capacities. More specifically, we consider a market setting where participants trade active power products by forming product-related associations in a decentralized, temporally flexible fashion. Taking topology-related aspects of the grid into account, the approach accounts for the current trend towards more location-aware, regional-oriented market structures and thus provides the potential for a more efficient power provision.