Enhancing network-constrained P2P energy sharing through virtual communities

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) exchanges provide opportunities for prosumers to meet their energy needs cost-effectively with the effective utilization of renewable energy sources (RES). Along with the benefits, P2P energy trading also raises issues in distribution network operations. The proposed framework has the potential to handle transactions in regard to network constraints by leveraging the benefits of dynamic utilization-based charges for network usages and power pricing structures. This work proposes a novel P2P energy trading framework comprising virtual communities (VCs) made by grouping buildings located on a particular bus. A cooperative game is formulated for inter- and intra- bus energy trading. A battery energy storage system (BESS) is present in each VC, and a stochastic model is used for coping with the uncertainties related to RESs. In this work, each player’s individual problem is decoupled to achieve equilibrium in a decentralized manner to avoid security and privacy issues. This research focuses on the significant reduction in the net energy cost of the buildings in the presence of uncertain renewable energy generations by taking advantage of the load variability of buildings present on the same and different buses without violating any network constraints and raising any privacy concerns. The proposed framework reduces the building cost by 21.87%.