Quantifying Market Efficiency Impacts of Aggregated Distributed Energy Resources

This paper focuses on the aggregation of distributed energy resources (DERs) through a profit-maximizing intermediary that enables participation of DERs in wholesale electricity markets. Particularly, we study the market efficiency brought in by the large-scale deployment of DERs and explore to what extent such benefits are offset by the profit-maximizing nature of the aggregator. We deploy a game-theoretic framework to study the strategic interactions between agreggators and DER owners. The proposed model explicitly takes into account the stochastic nature of the DER supply. We explicitly characterize the equilibrium of the game under general assumptions and provide illustrative examples to quantify the efficiency loss due to the strategic incentives of the aggregator. Our numerical experiments illustrate the impact of uncertainty and amount of DER integration on the overall market efficiency.