User-centric peer-to-peer energy system for residential microgrids

The development of distributed energy resources (DERs) and the increasing affordability of residential solar power has meant that more and more families are now supplying their own domestic electricity with small-scale generating systems. This brings enormous opportunities and challenges to the energy market. The chance to develop new business models that give residential customers different options to deal with their excess generation, is one such opportunity. At this point, the choice made by most is to sell the residual energy back to the grid in return for payment of a feed-in-tariff by the network, even though the current level that tariff is only 1/4 or 1/3 of the cost of buying electricity from the grid. This means the potential benefit of installing a domestic solar system has not yet be fully realised and, in the absence of any financial motivation to install solar, it is likely to slow down the speed at which the market transforms to clean energy. It is therefore critical to find a way to maximise the financial efficiency of residential microgrids. A potential and promising solution is peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading in a residential microgrid. This thesis introduces, explains and compares three different structures for a peer-to-peer energy trading system. The main focus is on finding a solution that maximises both the financial incentive and social welfare. The thesis presented user centric peer to peer energy system and proposed modelling ways. In this model, potential P2P energy trading mechanisms are introduced and two innovative pricing strategies are evaluated. Based on end-user actual net-power demand, a case study is conducted to calculate, analyse and compare the impact of the P2P pricing strategies on a traditional electricity bill. To explore the effect of the two pricing strategies on the decision making of different customers, a P2P energy trading option based on prosumer profile is discussed. In summary, the proposed methods have been successfully demonstrated and compared with existing works. Simulated results were able to verify the efficiency and superiority of the proposed mechanism over other approaches