Energy Economics for Smart Grids, Transactive Energy, and Carbon-Neutral Energy

Dear Colleagues,

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the world. Energy use accounts for almost 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and energy demand is projected to continue growing as economies shift and the world's population grows. Our power and energy systems are now at the forefront of decarbonization to achieve net zero by integrating low-carbon sustainable energy resources. Due to the inherent variability and uncertainty of weather-dependent renewables, electric vehicle charging, and prosumer demand response, the planning and operation of energy systems have become more challenging than ever before.

Thanks to the information and communication technologies (ICT), such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital twins, the energy system operators, utilities, and prosumers are collecting energy supply and demand data and can communicate with each other to facilitate better planning and operation strategies. For example, two-way communications enable smart grids, in which the operator, suppliers, and consumers can coordinate the system operation and utilize the demand flexibility to perform demand response. Microgrids and virtual power plants (VPPs) facilitate energy system operations and coordination by integrating various players, such as PV, wind energy, battery storage units, and smart prosumers, in a subsystem. Prosumers with distributed energy resources (DERs) can support each other through transactive energy performing peer-to-peer energy trading and also support the grid by providing energy services through energy aggregators.

The challenge remains as it lacks proper effective economic/market mechanisms and business models to balance the varying supply and demand with high penetration of low-carbon sustainable energy resources in both transmission and distribution networks. This Special Issue aims to highlight the state of the art in energy economics, energy markets, and business models for smart grids, microgrids, and transactive energy systems. Research questions may include how to incentivize participation of prosumers in demand response, vehicle-to-X, and VPP operation; how to optimally plan and operate the system to be robust and resilient in the presence of high uptake of sustainable energy resources; how to improve the existing market mechanisms for energy, demand flexibility, balancing services, capacity, and ancillary services; and how to design new markets and business models for emerging technologies, such as transactive energy, energy aggregation, energy trading, and carbon credit.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Power and energy system planning and operation for transmission and distribution networks;
• Transmission-distribution coordination and AC and DC interconnection;
• Integration of high penetration of renewable energy (including large-scale renewables and distributed renewables);
• Integration of flexible energy resources, such as demand response, energy storage, electric vehicles, and multiple energy;
• Analysis of electricity markets, such as the energy market, balancing market, ancillary market, and capacity market;
• Wholesale electricity market (including offering/bidding, pricing, market clearing);
• Distribution-level market design, such as pricing, mechanism, and business model for DERs;
• Pricing and tariff for energy use and transactive energy, including time-of-use pricing, dynamic pricing, tiered pricing, and seasonal pricing;
• Incentive mechanism and business model for flexible energy resources and peer-to-peer energy trading;
• Economics and market participation of energy storage and electric vehicle;
• Game-theoretic analysis of energy systems;
• Carbon credits, markets, offsets, and economic mechanism for carbon-neutral energy;
• Market and economic mechanisms empowered by emerging technologies, such as AI and blockchain.

We look forward to receiving your contributions. 

Dr. Hao Wang
Prof. Dr. Yanru Zhang
Prof. Dr. Xiaoyu Zhang
Dr. Changlong Wang
Guest Editors

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• energy economics
• electricity market
• incentive mechanism
• business model
• energy system
• sustainable energy
• carbon-neutral
• planning and operation
• AI
• blockchain