Seminar: Alex Rogers, University of Southampton.

Title: Mechanism Design for the Smart Grid.

Abstract:

The vision of a smart electricity grid which provides real-time price information to consumers is one of the core components of many countries' planned transition to a low-carbon economy, and within such a system, there are many opportunities to reconsider how electricity is currently priced and traded. In this talk, I will describe some of the work taking place within Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton applying mechanism design to this exciting application domain. In particular, I'll describe a novel dominant-strategy incentive compatible online mechanism for pricing electric vehicle charging that allows both the individual preferences of the vehicle owners and the constraints of the local distribution networks to accommodated, and a novel mechanism that allows an energy aggregator to pay for consumption predictions from its customers, incentivising them to provide accurate and precise estimates.