Coordinated design of multi-stakeholder distributed energy systems with flexible demand resources from an energy-sharing perspective

Energy sharing helps to promote the development of distributed energy systems from an individual mode to a group mode to realize the spatiotemporal complementarity of heterogeneous energy supply and consumption. When not considering the information of neighboring energy systems, an investor may not receive reasonable benefits to justify infrastructure investment costs, leading to suboptimal system design. This paper proposes a game-based equilibrium model to characterize the interactions between distributed energy systems and customers with flexible energy demand. On this basis, to guide energy sharing among distributed energy systems with flexible resources, a coordination mechanism is developed featuring a contribution-based asymmetric bargaining scheme, which allocates shared benefits proportionally to each participant’s marginal contribution to system-wide optimization. Furthermore, the planning model is constructed considering the equilibrium distribution of individual interests for multiple stakeholder’s coordination. Numerical results indicate that the coordinated design reduces the investment cost of stakeholders by 14.20 % compared to the individual design scenario, and decreases total costs from 5.28 million to 4.96 million dollars. The influence of natural gas prices and load profiles on the coordinated design results has been analyzed. This research offers a fresh perspective for the coordinated planning of distributed energy systems catering to flexible demand, highlighting its practical relevance for early-stage design challenges.