A Novel Peer-to-Peer Electricity Market Mechanism with the Participation of Electricity Retailers

With the wider implementation of distributed energy resources (DER), more electricity consumers acquire the ability to produce electricity locally for consumption and transaction, turning themselves into proactive producers and also consumers, namely “prosumers”, in the power system. The peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity transaction paradigm is therefore popular for use in local electricity transactions between prosumers and consumers as it incents free trading within the local power community and implementation of DER devices. Nevertheless, many ordinary consumers are not intended to be involved in the P2P market and purchase electricity from electricity retailers. There is a demand for the coexistence of P2P and the retail electricity market mechanism. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel P2P electricity market mechanism accounting for the participation of electricity retailers. The P2P market would operate as a day-ahead market, where the retailers can participate in implementing the P2P electricity transaction with prosumers and consumers. The multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm is adopted to model the operation of the proposed market, in which market participants are rational and profit-seeking agents to generate strategies to maximize their profits in market transactions. Simulation results show that retailers in the P2P market play the role of coordinators between the P2P market and the wholesale electricity market (WEM), and further research is still needed.