Peer-to-peer energy trading among smart homes

This paper evaluates the impact of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading among the smart homes in a microgrid. Recent trends show that the households are gradually adopting renewables (e.g., photovoltaics) and energy storage (e.g., electric vehicles) in their premises. This research addresses the energy cost optimization problem in the smart homes which are connected together for energy sharing. The contributions of this paper is threefold. First, we propose a near-optimal algorithm, named Energy Cost Optimization via Trade (ECO-Trade), which coordinates P2P energy trading among the smart homes with a Demand Side Management (DSM) system. Our results show that, for real datasets, 99% of the solutions generated by the ECO-Trade algorithm are optimal solutions. Second, P2P energy trading in the microgrid potentially results in an unfair cost distribution among the participating households. We address this unfair cost distribution problem by enforcing Pareto optimality, ensuring that no households will be worse off to improve the cost of others. Finally, we evaluate the impact of renewables and storage penetration rate in the microgrid. Our results show that cost savings do not always increase linearly with an increase in the renewables and storage penetration rate. Rather they decrease gradually after a saturation point