A Mycorrhizal Model for Transactive Solar Energy Markets with Battery Storage

Zachary Michael Isaac Gould (), Vikram Mohanty, Georg Reichard, Walid Saad, Tripp Shealy and Susan Day
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Zachary Michael Isaac Gould: Department of Building Construction, Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA
Vikram Mohanty: Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Arlington, VA 22203, USA
Georg Reichard: Department of Building Construction, Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA
Walid Saad: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Arlington, VA 22203, USA
Tripp Shealy: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA
Susan Day: Department of Forest Resources Management, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 10, 1-19

Abstract: Distributed market structures for local, transactive energy trading can be modeled with ecological systems, such as mycorrhizal networks, which have evolved to facilitate interplant carbon exchange in forest ecosystems. However, the complexity of these ecological systems can make it challenging to understand the effect that adopting these models could have on distributed energy systems and the magnitude of associated performance parameters. We therefore simplified and implemented a previously developed blueprint for mycorrhizal energy market models to isolate the effect of the mycorrhizal intervention in allowing buildings to redistribute portions of energy assets on competing local, decentralized marketplaces. Results indicate that the applied mycorrhizal intervention only minimally affects market and building performance indicators—increasing market self-consumption, decreasing market self-sufficiency, and decreasing building weekly savings across all seasonal (winter, fall, summer) and typological (residential, mixed-use) cases when compared to a fixed, retail feed-in-tariff market structure. The work concludes with a discussion of opportunities for further expansion of the proposed mycorrhizal market framework through reinforcement learning as well as limitations and policy recommendations considering emerging aggregated distributed energy resource (DER) access to wholesale energy markets.

Keywords: transactive energy; wholesale energy markets; distributed energy resources; distributed ledgers; blockchain; bio-inspired computing; bio-inspired design; ecological modeling; multi-agent systems; mycorrhizal networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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