Energy Trading and Management Strategies in a Regional Integrated Energy System with Multiple Energy Carriers and Renewable-Energy Generation

Abstract

With the development of energy markets and the introduction of renewable energy certificates (RECs), a regional integrated energy system (RIES) may participate in an energy wholesale market flexibly. In this paper, a bilevel optimization problem is formulated to determine the optimal management strategies of an RIES, including trading in the markets of electricity, natural gas, and RECs. In the bilevel model, an energy supplier (ES) purchases energy from energy wholesale markets and sets retail prices of energy products at the upper level to maximize its profit. At the lower level, various user aggregators (UAs) determine individual energy consumption strategies. The clearing prices of electricity, natural gas, and REC markets are determined asynchronously at the lower level. This nonlinear problem is then transformed into a mixed-integer linear programming problem using the incremental method and strong duality theory, which enables the problem to be solved efficiently. Finally, case studies are carried out to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method and the impacts of the RECs.