Transactive Energy Application Landscape Scenarios

Reviewing the transactive energy landscape

Transactive energy (TE) is a term increasingly used in the electric utility industry to describe a range of next-generation approaches to managing the grid. Generally speaking, transactive energy is a system of economic and control mechanisms that allows for the balancing of supply and demand dispatched across an electrical infrastructure. Ultimately, TE systems must facilitate the efficient and reliable integration of large numbers of distributed energy resources (including behind the meter), beyond what is possible today.

This paper presents an analysis of the TE application landscape, specifically examining the transactive process, business functions, actors in different smart grid application domains, and time scales. The paper presents six high-level operational scenarios, reviews the process that was used to analyze the TE landscape, and validates the scenarios against a set of TE dimensions. These scenarios may be useful for stakeholders — such as utilities, regulators, and policymakers — seeking to understand the scope of TE applications, develop TE architectures, or create more detailed use cases for specific business functions.

What’s in the report

• Descriptions of TE systems and summaries of TE objectives, principles, and attributes
• Process for analyzing the TE landscape, including use case analyses, TE mind map, and a transactive agent interaction model
• Six high-level use case scenarios, each of which was compared to a set of TE dimensions in a matrix format
• Validation analysis to see how well the scenarios cover the TE landscape