Development of a Multi-Community Peer-to-Peer Electricity Trading Mechanism

Peer-to-peer electricity trading allows individual energy producers and consumers to trade electricity directly with one another. They can be managed as a single unit in the form of an energy community. However, in this study, a multi-community peer-to-peer electricity trading mechanism was developed to enable excess electricity from renewable sources to be traded between multiple communities. For this purpose, two energy communities were considered, in which there are generation and storage technologies such as PV panels, wind turbines, energy storage systems, and flexible and non-flexible loads. A Bill Sharing method was adopted to determine the price of electricity traded between different peers within each community and between the two communities and the suppliers. The efficacy of the proposed peer-to-peer electricity trading in decreasing the cost of satisfying the electricity demand in the communities was investigated. The proposed model reduces the average daily electricity costs by 64% compared with the case without peer-to-peer electricity trading.