Peer-to-Peer Energy Systems for Connected Communities: A Review of Recent Advances and Emerging Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in peer-to-peer energy sharing within connected communities, highlighting technological progress, pilot projects, and the challenges to wider implementation in current electricity markets.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of P2P energy systems, classifies recent advances systematically, and discusses key challenges for scaling up in real-world markets.

Findings

P2P sharing benefits prosumers and the grid.

Several pilot projects demonstrate feasibility.

Major challenges include market regulation and technology integration.

Abstract

After a century of relative stability of the electricity industry, extensive deployment of distributed energy resources and recent advances in computation and communication technologies have changed the nature of how we consume, trade, and apply energy. The power system is facing a transition from its traditional hierarchical structure to a more deregulated model by introducing new energy distribution models such as peer-to-peer sharing for connected communities. The proven effectiveness of P2P sharing in benefiting both prosumers and the grid has been demonstrated in many studies and pilot projects. However, there is still no extensive implementation of such sharing models in today's electricity markets. This paper aims to shed some light on this gap through a comprehensive overview of recent advances in the P2P energy system and an insightful discussion of the challenges that need to be addressed in order to establish P2P sharing as a viable energy management option in today's electricity market. To this end, in this article, we provide some background on different aspects of P2P sharing. Then, we discuss advances in P2P sharing through a systematic domain-based classification. We also review different pilot projects on P2P sharing across the globe. Finally, we identify and discuss a number of challenges that need to be addressed for scaling up P2P sharing in the electricity market followed by concluding remarks at the end of the paper.