A Mean-Field Game Approach to Equilibrium Pricing in Solar Renewable Energy Certificate Markets

Solar Renewable Energy Certificate (SREC) markets are a market-based system that incentivizes solar energy generation. A regulatory body imposes a lower bound on the amount of energy each regulated firm must generate via solar means, providing them with a tradeable certificate for each MWh generated. Firms seek to navigate the market optimally by modulating their SREC generation and trading rates. As such, the SREC market can be viewed as a stochastic game, where agents interact through the SREC price. We study this stochastic game by solving the mean-field game (MFG) limit with sub-populations of heterogeneous agents. Market participants optimize costs accounting for trading frictions, cost of generation, non-linear non-compliance costs, and generation uncertainty. Moreover, we endogenize SREC price through market clearing. We characterize firms' optimal controls as the solution of McKean-Vlasov (MV) FBSDEs and determine the equilibrium SREC price. We establish the existence and uniqueness of a solution to this MV-FBSDE, and prove that the MFG strategies form an ε-Nash equilibrium for the finite player game. Finally, we develop a numerical scheme for solving the MV-FBSDEs and conduct a simulation study.