A Decentralised Coordination Framework for Demand-Side Solar-Storage and Its Electricity Market Participation

The rapid proliferation of rooftop photovoltaics and behind-the-meter battery storage is creating systemic risks in distribution networks. This includes local network constraint violations, insufficient outage resilience, and enlarged cybersecurity attack surfaces, leaving millions of demand-side distributed energy resources (DERs) to operate without coordinated oversight. Existing solutions (dynamic operating envelopes, virtual power plants, peer-to-peer trading, and single-household energy management systems) each address only partial aspects of this challenge. Based on multi-agent reinforcement learning, this paper proposes a Decentralised Coordination Framework (DCF) that organises the energy dispatch into a three-tier hierarchical architecture. Specifically, it has a user layer executing Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) for local dispatch, a feeder layer in which a dynamically elected L1 leader applies MADDPG to coordinate community flexibility via a Virtual Aggregation Unit (VAU); and a cross-feeder layer where an L2 leader manages inter-community balancing and market interfaces. It integrates a directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based verifiable execution ledger, Paillier homomorphic encryption, and LLM-based anomaly detection to enhance security. Potential market participation pathway and revenue distribution mechanism are proposed to align with the Australian National Electricity Market. The DCF provides a scalable, market-ready foundation for commercial demandside DER deployment under high renewable penetration.