Peer-to-peer and community-based markets: A comprehensive review

The advent of more proactive consumers, the so-called "prosumers", with production and storage capabilities, is empowering the consumers and bringing new opportunities and challenges to the operation of power systems in a market environment. Recently, a novel proposal for the design and operation of electricity markets has emerged: these so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity markets conceptually allow the prosumers to directly share their electrical energy and investment. Such P2P markets rely on a consumer-centric and bottom-up perspective by giving the opportunity to consumers to freely choose the way they are to source their electric energy. A community can also be formed by prosumers who want to collaborate, or in terms of operational energy management. This paper contributes with an overview of these new P2P markets that starts with the motivation, challenges, market designs moving to the potential future developments in this field, providing recommendations while considering a test-case

Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview

The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity network—the smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio

Decentralization in the electricity system: At the household, community and city levels

Recent years have seen a rise in the number of implementations of small-scale generation and storage technologies for electricity and heat at different levels in the energy system. This trend towards decentralization of the system is driven by rapid decrease in technology costs, as well as the intentions expressed by various stakeholders to contribute to a carbon-neutral energy system. This thesis investigates the investments and operation of generation and storage technologies at three levels within the energy system: i) residential Prosumer households, which use photovoltaic (PV)-battery systems to supply and shift their electricity demand; ii) Prosumer communities, in which prosumer households share electricity; and iii) Smart integrated cities, which make use of interconnections between the electricity, heating, and transport sectors.Three techno-economic optimization modeling methods are utilized to study technology investment and dispatch, self-consumption of electricity and heat at different levels of decentralization, and the interactions that occur between decentralized systems and the centralized electricity system. Prosumer households are modeled by combining a household electricity cost optimization model and a northern European electricity system dispatch model. The optimization model developed to study prosumer communities directly compares the PV-battery system investments and operations in individual prosumer households and in prosumer households within a community. The city energy system optimization model is designed to analyze interconnections between the urban electricity and heat (and in future work, also transport) sectors.It is shown that prosumer households under the current Swedish tariff system experience a strong incentive to self-consume PV-generated electricity within their households and experience a weak incentive to operate their battery systems such as to reduce operational costs within the electricity system. Being part of a prosumer community can provide the highest monetary benefit to prosumer households for the purpose of reducing the connection capacity to the centralized system. Prosumer communities exhibit different patterns of electricity trade to the centralized system than individual prosumer households, due to local balancing of electricity within the community. On the city level, the installation of local generation and storage technologies for electricity and heat can reduce the stress on the connection to the centralized electricity system. Thus, local electricity generation can help to meet increases in electricity demand and demand peaks at the city level, stemming from city growth or electrification of energy use within the city. An interaction between the electricity and heating sectors in the city energy system can in the modeling results be seen in, for example, the utilization of power-to-heat technologies, which often use electricity during low-cost hours. Storage systems for electricity and heat are utilized within the city to shift electricity and heat between different periods

Decentralization in energy systems - Low-carbon technologies and sector coupling on the household, community and city scales

The number of installations of distributed energy technologies, such as solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery systems, has increased dramatically in recent decades. The required transition towards a decarbonized energy system entails electrification of the different sectors. Both these developments provide new opportunities for energy autonomy and sector coupling in decentralized systems, and allow local actors to contribute to reducing their climate impact.The aim of this thesis is to study the utilization of local energy technologies and the potential for system flexibility in three decentralized energy systems: prosumer households, prosumer communities, and city energy systems. In addition, the thesis investigates the interactions of decentralized systems with the surrounding regional energy system. In this work, four techno-economic energy system optimization models are used. In the first model, PV-battery systems in prosumer households are analyzed within the North European electricity system dispatch. In the second model, they are examined as part of prosumer communities. In the third, city-scale model the investment and dispatch in the electricity and district heating sectors are optimized, while considering flexible and inflexible charging of electric cars and buses. The fourth model combines the city and regional scales, to study the operation, design and interaction of both systems, while considering different connection capacities for electricity exchange between the systems.The results show that the economic incentives for electricity self-consumption in prosumer households promote a way of utilizing household battery systems that is not in line with the least‑cost dispatch of the electricity system. Consequently, prosumer households are, within the current tariff structure, unlikely to provide flexibility that would assist the balancing of intermittency in the regional electricity system. In prosumer communities, where prosumer households have the possibility to share electricity, a financial benefit accrues to the participating households primarily when there is a reduced connection capacity for electricity exchange to the energy provider. For city energy systems, it is shown that power-to-heat technologies in combination with thermal storage systems and flexibility with regards to the charging of battery electric vehicles facilitate the uptake of local solar PV. The city electric car fleet provides the potential to postpone up to 85% of the demand for charging, which leads to more than twice the share of solar PV in the electricity mix for charging, as compared with inflexible charging. A 50% connection capacity between the city-scale and regional-scale energy systems implies only 3% higher costs for the installation and operation of energy technologies on both scales, as compared with a system that has 100% connection capacity.This thesis outlines the potential for increased decentralization of the energy supply and highlights the need for strategies to integrate decentralized and centralized energy systems

The Role and Value of Service Orchestration in Smart Grid Prosumer Service Systems

The implementation of smart grid infrastructure as well as the rise of eco-conscious prosumers in the energy markets are leading to a paradigm shift in the energy sector. Residential households can no longer be viewed as passive market entities, but have to be considered as actors participating in value creation. In this work, we present the co-creation of value in energy markets through the lens of service dominant logic, and highlight the importance of service orchestrators for deriving both design decisions and operational decisions for complex energy systems. For the example of a real-time energy trading service, we assess the value of service orchestration by means of a simulation study. Thereby, we highlight the importance of service orchestration for creating valuable business opportunities, and we provide a transdisciplinary approach that combines service science and service operations research

A Comparative Assessment of Embedded Energy Storage and Electric Vehicle Integration in a Community Virtual Power Plant

© 2018, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. Among the key objectives of the smart grid technology are to foster the grid integration of renewable energy as well as market participation of domestic energy consumers through demand response program. Energy storage remains a key component of the smart grid. Past works on integration of energy storage at the domestic side of the electricity grid has identified the electric vehicle technology (EV) and the embedded energy storage (EES) technology, etc. However, it was difficult to compare between these technologies in terms of business incentives and technical performance. This was investigated in this work, and the results are presented. It was propose to use percentage difference to compare between VPP with EES and VPP with EV. The results shows that the difference in prosumers incentives between VPP with EES and VPP with EV is very low. It is approximately 0.89%. However, the percentage difference in VPP operator profit between VPP with EES and VPP with EV is very high. It is approximately 85.3%. The VPP makes very high profit in the VPP EES case compared to VPP EV case. The same also applies to the VPP cumulative performance where the percentage difference in the VPP cumulative performance between VPP with EES and VPP with EV is approximately 10.9%. This has implication on the storage mechanism to be integrated in to a VPP at the domestic level as well the business model to be adopted.Published versio

PROSUMER ENERGY DIFFUSION DETERMINANTS IN ASSOCIATION WITH LOCAL PLANS OF LOW EMISSION - SMOG - REDUCTION

The cognitive focus of the article concerns the measurement and aggregation of relationships between the diffusion of prosumer energy development and the effectiveness of implementing local Plans of Low Emissions Reduction. In this context, the Authors have justified that local actions in the area of low emission prevention (smog - unusual atmospheric phenomenon) are fully converged with the activities of prosumers, producing energy, among others, in order to meet their own needs. On the basis of the literature query and interviews in a group of managers of the energy and environmental management in territorial units - local perspective (in the selected EU country), levels of energy prosumer transformation have been determined in relation to the measures in the scope of low emission prevention.&nbsp