Electricity market design for the prosumer era

By Y. Parag, Benjamin Sovacool. Nature Energy, 2016

1,116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Prosumers are agents that both consume and produce energy. With the growth in small and medium-sized agents using solar photovoltaic panels, smart meters, vehicle-to-grid electric automobiles, home batteries and other ‘smart’ devices, prosuming offers the potential for consumers and vehicle owners to re-evaluate their energy practices. As the number of prosumers increases, the electric utility sector of today is likely to undergo significant changes over the coming decades, offering possibilities for greening of the system, but also bringing many unknowns and risks that need to be identified and managed. To develop strategies for the future, policymakers and planners need knowledge of how prosumers could be integrated effectively and efficiently into competitive electricity markets. Here we identify and discuss three promising potential prosumer markets related to prosumer grid integration, peer-to-peer models and prosumer community groups. We also caution against optimism by laying out a series of caveats and complexities. Small-scale renewable energy systems and smart technologies are enabling energy consumers to become producers and service providers as well. This Perspective explores this ‘prosumption’ phenomenon, highlighting three promising prosumer market models and the challenges for future implementation.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f3f7b1e516b2c0a37a9e4fa45a7d76ce5df4e46

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Citations in the corpus

Multiclass Energy Management for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Driven by Prosumer Preferences (2019, neutral): “trading between prosumers [30], [31].”
Bilateral Contract Networks for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading (2019, background): “Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading markets have been proposed to incentivise efficient prosumer distributed energy resource utilisation [16].”
What is prosumerism for? Exploring the normative dimensions of decentralised energy transitions (2020, background): “Here, prosumers are viewed as adopters of new consumer goods and change only their purchasing activity and consumption behaviour [6,88] in response to price signals and hedonic self-interest [89].”
User behavior in a real-world peer-to-peer electricity market (2020, background): “Existing literature on P2P energy trading mainly provides concepts [8,17] or simulation-based analyses [26,27] on the technical feasibility of P2P energy.”
Using peer-to-peer energy-trading platforms to incentivize prosumers to form federated power plants (2018, background): “Figure 2 shows block diagrams for a VPP, a Box 2 | P2P energy-trading platform models P2P energy trading is an emerging field of research, but pilot projects are already underway in several countries, including the Brooklyn Microgrid in the US, Piclo in the UK, Vandenbron in the Netherlands and sonn”
Peer-to-peer and community-based markets: A comprehensive review (2018, background): “Table 2: Summary of three P2P market designs (based on [48]).”
Forecasting: theory and practice (2020, background): “With the advent of peer-to-peer energy markets at the domestic consumer level (Parag and Sovacool, 2016), smart meter data exchange between peers is also expected to increase and enable collaborative forecasting schemes.”
Designing Decentralized Markets for Distribution System Flexibility (2019, background): “come ‘prosumers’–consumers who proactively manage their consumption, production and storage of energy [2].”