A storage pricing mechanism for learning agents in Masdar City smart grid

Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates is designed to be the first modern city powered solely by renewable energy. However, the stochastic nature of renewable energy generators has remained a major challenge in their sole and largescale deployment. Traditional approaches couple large-scale storage systems to renewable generators to mitigate the intermittency in their supply pattern. More recent approaches also study how emerging technologies such as electric vehicles and micro-batteries can be used as consumer-side storage. Future smart grids are however likely to contain both large and micro batteries and it is unclear how both technologies will work together. Hence in this paper, we present a novel model of joint-storage management that allows both renewable energy suppliers and consumers to coordinate in a decentralized manner by gradually adopting storage abilities. For this model, we present a dynamic storage-pricing mechanism that makes use of the storage information from the renewable supplier to generate daily, real-time electricity prices which are communicated to the consumers. We empirically evaluate the system and show that, when all homes are equipped with storage devices, the supplier can significantly improve the efficiency of the system by up to 23%, while the consumer reduces its costs by up to 35%.