A new trading mechanism for prosumers based on flexible reliability preferences in active distribution network

Due to the rapid development of distributed renewable generation, emerging prosumers are encouraged to participate in the energy market. Meanwhile, blackout events, planned and unplanned outages due to weather, component failures and other causes, can also impact users’ experience. To maintain reliability and improve users’ experience under outage conditions, it is possible to transform the service reliability from a public good (compulsory and uniform) to a private good (self-selection). In this paper, a new restore mechanism based on private reliability service is proposed, the reliability service is no longer uniform. Customers with a higher reliability requirement are willing to pay to maintain their desired consumption in outage conditions. The customers are classified by dynamic elasticity considering historical data and real-time customer preferences. Then the advised unit price, trading amount and reliability level are provided to customer. Once they submit this information to market operator, the price and transaction amount is matched in each group, and floated average clearing price is applied to obtain the bidding results. The trading mechanism is proved to satisfy incentive compatibility, and the transaction process for a specific area in Australia is analyzed in a case study to verify the proposed model. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd.