Optimal Pricing and Energy-Sharing Strategies for a Commercial Building-Based Virtual Power Plant

Abstract

As distributed resources within buildings continue to grow, buildings have had a significant impact on the stability of the distribution network. It's urgent to effectively achieve regional power balancing and consumption within building clusters. Virtual power plants (VPP) are believed to be effective in aggregating and managing distributed resources. In this paper, an optimal pricing and energy-sharing mechanism for the commercial building-based VPP is proposed to promoting power balance in building clusters. The virtual power plants operator's (VPPO) pricing strategy is determined based on the Stackelberg game, considering the cooperative game of lower-tier buildings with energy sharing. A LHS and Kantorovich-distance-based scene generation and reduction method is used to deal with the uncertainties of PV, WT, and load power in buildings. Then, an improved Shapley-value method is proposed to distribute the benefits of cooperation to the buildings. Moreover, a Shapley-valued-based carbon-credit apportionment method is developed to form the range of emission allowance for each building. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed optimal pricing and energy-sharing mechanism, which can promote the power balance among multiple buildings while reducing the carbon emissions of the VPP. © 2025 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.