  Peer-to-peer energy trading is emerging as a new paradigm that in the near
future may disrupt conventional electricity markets and heavily affect energy
exchanges in networks of microgrids. In this paper, a preference mechanism is
considered to compute optimal energy exchanges in a network of microgrids with
or without the supervision of the distribution system operator, and the
alternating direction method of multipliers is adopted for its distributed
solution. The effect of the preference mechanism on the resulting power flow in
the network is further studied and discussed for realistic case studies.
Results show that a desired power flow in the network of interconnected
microgrids can be achieved with different preference values locally chosen or
imposed by the system operator. In particular, appropriate preferences may be
used to give rise to different clusters of microgrids and reduce energy
exchanges between different clusters.
