Energy trading in the smart grid: From end-user´s perspective

The smart grid is expected to be the next generation of electricity grid. It will enable numerous revolutionary features, that allow end-users, such as homes, communities, or businesses, to harvest renewable energy and store the energy in a local battery, which could act as a microgeneration unit. In addition, the customers could be provided with dynamic electricity pricing options under which the electricity price adjusts over a relatively small time scale, e.g., every hour, in response to the changing energy usage of the grid. Consequently, similar to the stock market, it presents an opportunity for an end-user to make profit by trading energy with the grid. More specifically, in this paper, we investigate the profit maximization problem for an end-user that is equipped with renewable energy harvesting devices and a battery, such that the user can buy/sell the energy from/to the grid by leveraging the varying price and the battery storage ability. The resulting algorithm performs arbitrarily close to the optimum without requiring future information of energy demands, electricity prices and the renewable energy arrival process. We validate our results through trace driven simulations.