Design of Smart Grid Prosumer Communities via Online Social Networking Communities

Abstract

Smart Grid (SG) achieves bidirectional energy and information flow between the energy user and the utility grid, allowing energy users not only to consume energy, but also to generate the energy and share it with the utility grid or with other energy consumers. This type of energy user who both consumes and generates energy is called the “prosumer”. The sustainability of the SG energy sharing process heavily depends on its participating prosumers, making prosumer participation and management schemes crucial in the energy sharing approaches. However, the existing literature on SG energy sharing has given very little attention to managing prosumers. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, we provide a comprehensive stateof-the-art review of managing prosumers in the context of SG and introduce the concept of goal oriented prosumer-communities through learning the aspects from social network communities. Second, we present a conceptual framework for forming a prosumer-community, based on online community formation. The significance of the prosumer community concept is that this will allow prosumers to collectively bargain for the energy with utility companies, thus offering the small players (prosumers) the negotiation power to be on par with big players (providers) and eliminate the dividing gap between them.