Peer-to-Peer Sharing of Energy Storage Systems under Net Metering and Time-of-Use Pricing

TL;DR

This paper proposes a cooperative peer-to-peer energy storage sharing model for households under net metering and ToU pricing, demonstrating cost savings and stability through game theory and real data application.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cost allocation and sharing algorithm for energy storage among households, ensuring fairness and stability in a P2P network under complex billing mechanisms.

Findings

Significant cost savings observed in real community data

The sharing game has a non-empty core ensuring stability

Proposed mechanism is fair and easy to compute

Abstract

Sharing economy has become a socio-economic trend in transportation and housing sectors. It develops business models leveraging underutilized resources. Like those sectors, power grid is also becoming smarter with many flexible resources, and researchers are investigating the impact of sharing resources here as well that can help to reduce cost and extract value. In this work, we investigate sharing of energy storage devices among individual households in a cooperative fashion. Coalitional game theory is used to model the scenario where utility company imposes time-of-use (ToU) price and net metering billing mechanism. The resulting game has a non-empty core and we can develop a cost allocation mechanism with easy to compute analytical formula. Allocation is fair and cost effective for every household. We design the price for peer to peer network (P2P) and an algorithm for sharing that keeps the grand coalition always stable. Thus sharing electricity of storage devices among consumers can be effective in this set-up. Our mechanism is implemented in a community of 80 households in Texas using real data of demand and solar irradiance and the results show significant cost savings for our method.