Prosumer Communities Research Articles

Energy Management in Prosumer Communities: A Coordinated Approach

The introduction of uncontrollable renewable energy is having a positive impact on our health, the climate, and the economy, but it is also pushing the limits of the power system. The main reason for this is that, in any power system, the generation and consumption must match each other at all times. Thus, if we want to further introduce uncontrollable generation, we need a large ability to manage the demand. However, the ability to control the power consumption of existing demand management approaches is limited, and most of these approaches cannot contribute to the introduction of reneweables, because they do not consider distributed uncontrolled consumption and generation in the control. Furthermore, these methods do not allow users to exchange or jointly manage their power generation and consumption. In this context, we propose an augmented energy management model for prosumers (i.e., producer and consumer). This model considers controlled and uncontrolled generation and consumption, as well as the prosumer’s ability (i) to plan the intended power consumption; and (ii) to manage real-time deviations from the intended consumption. We apply this model to the energy management of prosumer communities, by allowing the prosumers to coordinate their power consumption plan, to manage the deviations from the intended consumption, and to help each other by compensating deviations. The proposed approach seeks to enhance the power system, and to enable a prosumer society that takes account social and environmental issues, as well as each prosumer’s quality of life.

Design of Smart Grid Prosumer Communities via Online Social Networking Communities

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.