Honoring Grid Commitments: Prosumer Scheduling Under Uncertainty

Smart grid achieves bidirectional energy flow between the energy users and utility grid by allowing prosumers to generate the energy and share it with the grid. Hence the prosumer scheduling is of great importance from the utility operations' point of view. Existing literature has limited focus on prosumer scheduling under uncertainty and thus the impacts of uncertainty on prosumer interactions with the grid are not fully understood. Furthermore, no scheduling schemes consider explicit compliance of actual grid exchanges with scheduled values, thus imparting a high degree of variability to grid loading due to prosumers. This paper proposes a scheduling formulation for prosumers to adhere to their grid commitments. Specifically, a two-stage stochastic control problem is formulated to explicitly consider uncertainties in solar production and residential demand. The formulation models recourse decisions to account for deviations from forecast conditions and a high degree of compliance of grid interactions with schedule is ensured via appropriate choice of objective function. The proposed formulation is compared against a typical prosumer scheduling algorithm based on forecast conditions. Results emphasize how deviations in grid interactions due to uncertainties can be avoided via the proposed formulation.