Selfish Energy Sharing in Prosumer Communities: A Demand-Side Management Concept
For utility companies and prosumer communities, this offers an alternative to energy trading schemes that does not require direct monetary transactions between households.
The paper proposes a demand-side management concept where prosumers selfishly share energy and schedule storage to reduce individual costs, using a game-theoretic model and a billing mechanism that avoids peer-to-peer monetary transactions.
Global warming is endangering the earth's ecosystem. It is imperative for us to limit green house gas emissions in order to combat rising global average temperatures. One way to move forward is the integration of renewable energy resources on all levels of the power system, i.e. from large-scale energy producers to individual households. The future smart grid provides the technology for this. In this paper, a novel demand-side management concept is proposed. It is implemented by a utility company which focuses on renewable energy. Through a specific billing mechanism, prosumers are encouraged to balance load and supply. A game-theoretic approach models households as self-determined rational energy users that want to reduce their individual electricity costs. To achieve this, they selfishly share energy with their neighbours and also schedule their energy storage systems. The scheme is designed such that monetary transactions between households are not necessary. Thus, it provides an alternative approach to energy trading schemes from the literature.