Lang Tong’s research while affiliated with Cornell University and other places

We address the issue of equitable energy access within an energy community consisting of members with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, including varying income levels and differing capacities to access distributed energy resources such as solar power and storage systems. While optimal energy consumption scheduling is well-studied, integrating equity into decentralized real-time energy access remains under-explored. This paper formulates Equity-regarding Welfare Maximization (EqWM)--a welfare optimization energy scheduling subject to equity constraints. We further develop a decentralized implementation (D-EqWM) as a bi-level optimization, where a non-profit operator designs a community pricing policy aimed at maximizing overall welfare, subject to constraints that ensure equitable access. Community members, in turn, optimize their individual consumption based on these prices. We present the optimal pricing policy along with its key properties.

The co-optimization of behind-the-meter distributed energy resources is considered for prosumers under the net energy metering tariff. The distributed energy resources considered include renewable generations, flexible demands, and battery energy storage systems. An energy management system co-optimizes the consumptions and battery storage based on locally available stochastic renewables by solving a stochastic dynamic program that maximizes the expected operation surplus. To circumvent the exponential complexity of the dynamic program solution, we propose a closed-form and linear computation complexity co-optimization algorithm based on a relaxation-projection approach to a constrained stochastic dynamic program. Sufficient conditions for optimality for the proposed solution are obtained. Numerical studies demonstrate orders of magnitude reduction of computation costs and significantly reduced optimality gap.

Distributed energy resource aggregators (DERAs) must share the distribution network together with the distribution utility in order to participate in the wholesale electricity markets that are operated by independent system operators (ISOs). We propose a forward auction that a distribution system operator (DSO) can utilize to allocate distribution network access limits to DERAs. As long as the DERAs operate within their acquired limits, these limits define operating envelopes that guarantee distribution network security, thus defining a mechanism that requires no real-time intervention from the DSOs for DERAs to participate in the wholesale markets. Our auctions take the form of robust and risk-sensitive markets with bids/offers from DERAs and utility's operational costs. Properties of the proposed auction, e.g., resulting surpluses of DSO and the DERAs, and the auction prices, along with empirical performance studies, are presented.

We propose a social welfare maximizing market mechanism for an energy community that aggregates individual and community-shared energy resources under a general net energy metering (NEM) policy. Referred to as Dynamic NEM (D-NEM), the proposed mechanism dynamically sets the community NEM prices based on aggregated community resources, including flexible consumption, storage, and renewable generation. D-NEM guarantees a higher benefit to each community member than possible outside the community, and no sub-communities would be better off departing from its parent community. D-NEM aligns each member's incentive with that of the community such that each member maximizing individual surplus under D-NEM results in maximum community social welfare. Empirical studies compare the proposed mechanism with existing benchmarks, demonstrating its welfare benefits, operational characteristics, and responsiveness to NEM rates.