NIST Transactive Energy Market Federate: A TE Market for GridLAB-D Co-Simulations

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The NIST Transactive Energy Market (TEM) federate was developed to simulate a local distribution electricity market. For a typical distribution grid customer's electricity tariff, utility power is offered at some price (whether a fixed or dynamic price) in unlimited quantities with the assumption that congestion is neglectable. However, in practice, there may be significant congestion, with overloading and voltage problems on a distribution circuit. Congestion could be tied to increasing electrification, including the addition of electric vehicle (EV) charging, while overvoltage may be tied to excess photovoltaic (PV) generation. It is possible that a local transformer serving four homes may be overloaded on a hot summer afternoon when each house has electric heat pumps, electric water heaters, and EV chargers consuming power. The aggregated load may also challenge the available capacity on the wider grid. The TEM implements a market using the OASIS Common Transactive Services (CTS) standard framework with a TE Market Agent (TEMA) as the market operator and TE User Agents (TEUA) that buy and sell energy on behalf of loads, storage, and generation assets behind customer meters. The TEMA receives bids and offers, issues quotes and transactions and tracks the position of each market participant. The TEUA may represent a single distributed energy resource (DER; smart load, generator, or storage) or aggregate the load curves of multiple building systems. The TEUA may serve as an intelligent agent (e.g., estimating future load based on historical consumption and other data), and may additionally have access to house meter data and the ability to track position for different loads. The TEUA may buy and sell power in forward and real-time markets to optimize energy use. Behind the TEUA interface, controllers manage devices based on their understanding of device flexibility and owner priorities. In initial simulation experiments, the NIST TEM implements a day-ahead hourly congestion-pricing-based quote-driven market. Market participants include all devices behind a specific service transformer. Initial prices of hourly power for the next day are set based on the bulk Day Ahead Market clearing price. Initial quotes are for a limited quantity of 75 % of the service transformer power flow rating. If the full amount of power available at this initial price is transacted (purchased by market participants) for some hour, then additional power (of a smaller quantity) is offered to the market for that hour at a higher price. Devices participating in the market may choose to pay the higher price for power in that hour, to move the load in time to a lower-price time interval, or to curtail. The market iterates until all devices have acquired power to meet their power needs according to their individual comfort and flexibility limits. This paper introduces the NIST TEM design and implementation.

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Energy

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