Peer-to-peer and community-based markets: A comprehensive review
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The advent of distributed power generation, e.g., from rooftop solar panels, storage and control devices, is inducing a transformation of a share of electricity consumers into prosumers, those having a proactive behavior when it comes to managing their consumption, production and energy storage. This empowerment of consumers brings new opportunities and challenges to the operation of power systems in a market environment. Recently, a novel proposal for the design and operation of electricity markets has emerged: these so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity markets conceptually allow the prosumers to directly share their electrical energy. Such P2P markets rely on a consumer-centric and bottom-up perspective by giving the opportunity to consumers to freely choose the way they are to source their electric energy, for instance based on expressed preferences (e.g. renewable type, CO2 emissions and localization). A community can also be formed by prosumers who want to collaborate to share their investments, or in terms of operational energy management. Our paper contributes with an overview of these new P2P markets that covers the motivation, challenges, market designs and the potential future developments in this field. Starting from the motivation and enablers behind the rising of such a disruptive concept for electricity markets, it progresses in presenting the ongoing research projects and real-world examples. We explore the different P2P market designs that have been proposed in terms of mathematical formulation, optimization techniques, advantages and challenges. The future prospects and recommendations about this topic are also made. Finally, a test-case is also presented to compare the different P2P market designs. The authors have made the data of the test-case available to allow future research on P2P markets while encouraging reproducibility and benchmarking.
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