Multi-supplier power grid framework based on multicommodity routing

Future power grid architectures need to efficiently incorporate new small-scale renewable energy suppliers in addition to large-scale power plants. We introduce a multi-producer multi-consumer congestion model of a power supply network, where production and transmission costs depend on the congestion in corresponding nodes and arcs of the network graph. The consumer goal is to meet their energy demand by purchasing energy from multiple suppliers while minimizing costs. We formulate the cost minimization problems for energy consumers with the assumption of constant-per-unit profit for energy producers. By adding a fictitious node to the graph with arcs toward the supplier nodes, we can formulate a networking game with a single source and multiple destinations. We apply multicommodity atomic routing methods and results to this system model in order to investigate the existence, the uniqueness and the efficiency of Nash equilibria for certain classes of cost functions. The efficiency is established in a simple example of this framework with a star-shaped network topology. Finally, we discuss possible extensions of the model.