Lately, the energy communities have gained a lot of attention as they have
the potential to significantly contribute to the resilience and flexibility of
the energy system, facilitating widespread integration of intermittent
renewable energy sources. Within these communities the prosumers can engage in
peer-to-peer trading, fostering local collaborations and increasing awareness
about energy usage and flexible consumption. However, even under these
favorable conditions, prosumer engagement levels remain low, requiring trading
mechanisms that are aligned with their social values and expectations. In this
paper, we introduce an innovative hedonic game coordination and cooperation
model for P2P energy trading among prosumers which considers the social
relationships within an energy community to create energy coalitions and
facilitate energy transactions among them. We defined a heuristic that
optimizes the prosumers coalitions, considering their social and energy price
preferences and balancing the energy demand and supply within the community. We
integrated the proposed hedonic game model into a state-of-the-art
blockchain-based P2P energy flexibility market and evaluated its performance
within an energy community of prosumers. The evaluation results on a
blockchain-based P2P energy flexibility market show the effectiveness in
considering social factors when creating coalitions, increasing the total
amount of energy transacted in a market session by 5% compared with other game
theory-based solutions. Finally, it shows the importance of the social
dimensions of P2P energy transactions, the positive social dynamics in the
energy community increasing the amount of energy transacted by more than 10%
while contributing to a more balanced energy demand and supply within the
community.Comment: to be submitted to journa