Cooperative Energy Provisioning Services With Virtual Power Plants in Smart Grid Internet of Things: A Coalition-Stackelberg Game Approach

With the advancement of communication technologies within the Smart Grid Internet of Things (SGIoT), virtual power plants (VPPs), which aggregate distributed energy resources, are increasingly encouraged to participate in energy provisioning services. However, the inherent variability in energy supplies among different VPPs, combined with the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of energy demands, poses significant challenges for efficient energy provisioning in a competitive environment involving multiple VPPs and numerous energy users. To address these challenges, this article proposes a cooperative energy provisioning scheme based on a coalition-Stackelberg game to enhance demand response management for VPPs in SGIoTs. First, a coalition formation game model is employed to create VPP clusters, enhancing both the reliability of energy supply and the profitability of individual VPPs. Subsequently, a multileader–multifollower (MLMF) Stackelberg game is utilized to model the competitive interactions between VPP coalitions and energy users, aiming to maximize the respective utilities of both parties. The existence of the Stackelberg equilibrium is rigorously analyzed and derived through an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMMs)-based energy requirement decision algorithm and an asynchronous gradient descent iteration-based pricing algorithm. These methods enable the determination of optimal electricity prices for VPP coalitions and optimal energy requirement decisions for individual users. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly enhances the utilities of both VPPs and energy users compared to conventional approaches.