Small-Scale Communities Are Sufficient for Cost- and Data-Efficient Peer-to-Peer Energy Sharing
Paper in proceeding, 2020

Due to ever lower cost, investments in renewable electricity generation and storage have become more attractive to electricity consumers in recent years. At the same time, electricity generation and storage have become something to share or trade locally in energy communities or microgrid systems. In this context, peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing has gained attention, since it offers a way to optimize the cost-benefits from distributed resources, making them financially more attractive. However, it is not yet clear in which situations consumers do have interests to team up and how much cost is saved through cooperation in practical instances. While introducing realistic continuous decisions, through detailed analysis based on large-scale measured household data, we show that the financial benefit of cooperation does not require an accurate forecasting. Furthermore, we provide strong evidence, based on analysis of the same data, that even P2P networks with only 2--5 participants can reach a high fraction (96% in our study) of the potential gain, i.e., of the ideal offline (i.e., non-continuous) achievable gain. Maintaining such small communities results in much lower associated costs and better privacy, as each participant only needs to share its data with 1--4 other peers. These findings shed new light and motivate requirements for distributed, continuous and dynamic P2P matching algorithms for energy trading and sharing.

prosumer communities

P2P energy trading

distributed matching

Author

Romaric Duvignau

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

Verena Heinisch

Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Energy Technology

Lisa Göransson

Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Energy Technology

Vincenzo Massimiliano Gulisano

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

Marina Papatriantafilou

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

e-Energy 2020 - Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems

35-46
978-1-4503-8009-6 (ISBN)

e-Energy '20
Virtual Event, Australia,

INDEED: Information and Data-processing in Focus for Energy Efficiency

Chalmers, 2020-01-01 -- .

ADAPT: Adaptive DigitAl Power sysTems

Chalmers, 2019-01-01 -- 2020-12-31.

Integrated cyber-physical solutions for intelligent distribution grid with high penetration of renewables (UNITED-GRID)

European Commission (EC) (EC/H2020/773717), 2017-11-01 -- 2020-04-30.

Subject Categories

Other Computer and Information Science

Communication Systems

Energy Systems

Areas of Advance

Energy

DOI

10.1145/3396851.3397741

More information

Latest update

3/21/2023