A game-theoretic approach to optimizing the scale of incorporating renewable sources of energy and electricity storing systems in a regional electrical grid

Abstract

The problem of developing a decision support system for estimating a) the scale of incorporating available renewable sources of energy (such as solar and wind energy) in a part of a country’s electrical grid (called a regional electrical grid further in this paper), and b) the scale of storing electricity in this (regional) electrical grid to make these renewable sources of electric power competitive with traditional power generators (such as fossil-fuel and nuclear ones) and to reduce the cost of acquiring electricity from all the electric power generating facilities in the grid is considered. In the framework of this system, renewable sources of energy are viewed as electricity generating facilities under both existing and expected electricity prices, and the uncertainty of energy supply from them and the uncertainty of the grid customer demand for electricity during every 24 h are taken into account. A mathematical model underlying the system allows one to study the interaction of all the grid elements as a game with a finite (more than three) number of players on a polyhedron of connected player strategies (i.e., strategies that cannot be chosen by the players independently of each other) in a finite-dimensional space. It is shown that solving both parts of the problem under consideration is reducible to finding Nash equilibrium points in this game.