Social Welfare in Battery Charging Games

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Krogmann, Simon, Lenzner, Pascal, Skopalik, Alexander, Sträubig, Tobias
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Krogmann, Simon
Lenzner, Pascal
Skopalik, Alexander
Sträubig, Tobias
author_facet Krogmann, Simon
Lenzner, Pascal
Skopalik, Alexander
Sträubig, Tobias
contents The recent rise of renewable energy produced by many decentralized sources yields interesting market design challenges for electrical grids. Balancing supply and demand in such networks is both a temporal and spatial challenge due to capacity constraints. The recent surge in the number of household-owned batteries, especially in regions with rooftop solar adoption, offers mitigation potential but often acts misaligned with grid-level objectives. In fact, the decision to charge or discharge a household-owned battery is a strategic choice by each battery owner governed by selfish incentives. This calls for an analysis from a game-theoretic point of view. We initiate this timely research direction by considering a game-theoretic setting where selfish agents strategically charge or discharge their batteries to increase their profit. In particular, we study a Stackelberg-like market model where a third party introduces price incentives, aiming to optimize renewable energy utilization while preserving grid feasibility. For this, we study the existence and the quality of equilibria under various pricing strategies. We find that the existence of equilibria crucially depends on the chosen pricing and that the obtained social welfare varies widely. This calls for more sophisticated market models and pricing mechanisms and opens up a rich field for future research in Algorithmic Game Theory on incentives in renewable energy networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_06320
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Social Welfare in Battery Charging Games
Krogmann, Simon
Lenzner, Pascal
Skopalik, Alexander
Sträubig, Tobias
Computer Science and Game Theory
The recent rise of renewable energy produced by many decentralized sources yields interesting market design challenges for electrical grids. Balancing supply and demand in such networks is both a temporal and spatial challenge due to capacity constraints. The recent surge in the number of household-owned batteries, especially in regions with rooftop solar adoption, offers mitigation potential but often acts misaligned with grid-level objectives. In fact, the decision to charge or discharge a household-owned battery is a strategic choice by each battery owner governed by selfish incentives. This calls for an analysis from a game-theoretic point of view. We initiate this timely research direction by considering a game-theoretic setting where selfish agents strategically charge or discharge their batteries to increase their profit. In particular, we study a Stackelberg-like market model where a third party introduces price incentives, aiming to optimize renewable energy utilization while preserving grid feasibility. For this, we study the existence and the quality of equilibria under various pricing strategies. We find that the existence of equilibria crucially depends on the chosen pricing and that the obtained social welfare varies widely. This calls for more sophisticated market models and pricing mechanisms and opens up a rich field for future research in Algorithmic Game Theory on incentives in renewable energy networks.
title Social Welfare in Battery Charging Games
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06320