A vision of the next-generation retail electricity market in the context of distributed energy resources

As distributed generation (DG) and smart grid technologies (SGTs) become more efficient and spread in the distribution grid, the number of agents taking advantage of such advances will continue to increase exponentially, making the next-generation retail electricity market more decentralized, competitive, and efficient. This growth will lead to the creation of new business models and transactive approaches to accommodate new agents, thus bringing new technical challenges concerning the security, reliability, and resilience of the transmission and distribution systems. This paper aims to present a vision of the next-generation retail electricity market by describing its expected characteristics, challenges, needs, and future research topics to be addressed.