A Two-Phase Hybrid Trading of Green Certificate under Renewables Portfolio Standards in Community of Active Energy Agents

The future distribution network is a community involving numerous active energy agents (AEAs) and a local operator. Each AEA is obligated to meet the renewables portfolio standards (RPS) with enough green certificates (GCs), which can be obtained from renewable energy consumption or from GC trading. This paper concentrates on the GC trading in AEA community and proposes a two-phase hybrid mechanism, which combines the peer-to-peer (P2P) phase and the centralized phase. In Phase 1, GCs are traded among AEAs in P2P manner. All AEAs are classified into two types: naive and sophisticated, each of which has the specific preference in GC trading. Additionally, each AEA finds trading partners by adopting multi-option-based matching. In Phase 2, the remaining GCs are traded between AEAs and the local operator. Numeric studies are performed on a 30-AEA community in three different market scenarios: globally balanced, undersupplied, and oversupplied. Simulation results indicate the optimality of bi-option, verify the effectiveness of the hybrid trading, and reveal the economic advantages over the sole centralized counterpart. The impact of AEA type is also discussed on both updating quotation and concluding deals.