Community Energy Storage Management for Welfare Optimization Using a Markov Decision Process

In this paper, we address an optimal management problem of community energy storage in the real-time electricity market under a stochastic renewable environment. In a real-time electricity market, complete market information may not be assessable for a strategic participant, hence we propose a paradigm that uses partial information including the forecast of real-time prices and slopes of the aggregate supply curve to model the price impact of storage use in the price-maker storage management problem. As a price maker, the community energy storage can not only earn profits through energy arbitrage but also smooth price trajectories and further influence social welfare. We formulate the problem as a finite-horizon Markov decision process that aims to maximize the energy arbitrage and social welfare of the prosumer-based community. The advance of the management scheme is that the optimal policy has a threshold structure. The structure has an analytic form that can guide the energy storage to charge/discharge by comparing its current marginal value and the expected future marginal value. Case studies indicate that welfare-maximizing storage earns more benefits than profit-maximizing storage. The proposed threshold-based algorithm can guarantee optimality and largely decrease the computational complexity of standard stochastic dynamic programming.