Hybrid energy sharing mechanism for integrated energy systems based on the Stackelberg game

Integrating the sharing economy and the power industry is of positive significance for the development of the energy market. With the energy market transforming from a traditional vertical structure to an interactive and competitive structure, users' roles need to change, along with supply and demand interacting more frequently. Thus, the traditional centralized optimization method for a single energy source can hardly reveal the complex multi-entity behavior of multi-energy coupling. Therefore, this paper establishes a distributed electrical-gas-thermal energy sharing mechanism centered on an energy hub that can converse energy, and build a more applicable integrated energy system body. First, the supply-demand interaction and the energy conversion process is constructed with reference to the operational mode of a sharing economy and the dual role of prosumers. A Stackelberg model is established with the integrated energy system operator as the leader and prosumers as the followers, to simultaneously optimize the profit of the leader in the upper level and the comfort of the followers' energy use and utility in the lower level. Furthermore, for protecting the participants' privacy, a distributed algorithm is used to find the optimal solution to equilibrate the model, and the existence and uniqueness of the solution is proved. Finally, a case study validates the effectiveness of the hybrid energy sharing mechanism and provides a reference for the integration of the energy sharing economy with the integrated energy system.