Optimal Regulation of Prosumers and Consumers in Smart Energy Communities

In a smart energy community, energy prosumers and consumers group together to achieve the community's social welfare. Prosumers are the users that both consume and produce energy. In this paper, we develop algorithms to regulate the number of prosumers and the number of consumers in the smart energy community. We consider that the prosumers have heterogeneous energy sources, such as solar photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. Each prosumer has one of the systems installed in their household. The prosumers and the consumers keep their information private and do not share it with other prosumers or consumers in the community. However, we consider a community manager that keeps track of the total number of active prosumers and consumers and sends feedback signals in the community at each time step. Over a long time, the average number of times a prosumer is active reaches its optimal value; analogously, the average number of times a consumer is active reaches its optimal value and the community achieves the social optimum value. We present the experimental results to check the efficacy of the algorithms.