A novel price-driven energy sharing mechanism for charging station operators

To address the deviations of energy schedules and increase benefits, charging station operators (CSOs) hope to trade energy in a low-cost and efficient way. Energy sharing has been noticed as a way to improve social welfare. When energy has commodity attributes, designing a better sharing mechanism from energy scarcity to stimulate prosumer flexibility and achieve optimal social welfare needs to be studied. In this paper, a novel price-driven energy sharing mechanism is designed for prosumers. A prosumer surplus model including energy utility is established to extend the prosumer flexibility. Value identity based on the “shared electricity price” enables prosumers to agree on a price voluntarily. It is proven that the new mechanism has the same unique optimal solution as the social planner's problem. Unlike the existing sharing mechanisms based on the generalized Nash game, the new mechanism can achieve optimal social welfare in a market with finite prosumers. On this basis, a local energy sharing model of CSOs is established, where the network constraints of the local system and time-varying utility are considered in the sharing process. The simulations show that the new mechanism can efficiently use the prosumers' generation and load flexibility to achieve better social welfare.