Feasibility Study of Financial P2P Energy Trading in a Grid-tied Power Network

TL;DR

This study evaluates the practicality of financial peer-to-peer energy trading in a grid-tied network, revealing economic benefits but highlighting potential technical and financial challenges for real-world implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a simple P2P trading scheme and assesses its feasibility on a low-voltage network, emphasizing the importance of considering network constraints in design.

Findings

Economic benefits for prosumers compared to feed-in-tariffs.

Potential voltage violations during simultaneous P2P trades.

Grid operator may face financial losses due to network issues.

Abstract

This paper studies the applicability of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading in a grid-tied network. The main objectives are to understand the impact of the financial P2P energy trading on the network operation, and thus demonstrate the importance of taking various issues related to power network into account while designing a practical P2P trading scheme. To do so, a simple mechanism is developed for energy trading among prosumers without considering any network constraints, as done by many existing studies. Once the trading parameters, such as the energy traded by each prosumer in the P2P market and the price per unit of energy are determined, the developed scheme is tested on a low-voltage (LV) network model to check its feasibility of deployment in a real P2P network. It is shown that although the considered trading scheme is economically beneficial to the participating prosumers compared to the existing incentive mechanisms (such as feed-in-tariff), it could be unfit for real deployment due to violating bus voltage limits during multiple P2P trading executed simultaneously. Further, the grid operator may experience financial losses for compensating the losses during P2P transactions.