PV sharing in local communities: Peer-to-peer trading under consideration of the prosumers' willingness-to-pay

Distributed on-site PV generation enables traditional consumers to become active participants in a decentralized energy system. In this work, a linear program optimizing peer-to-peer trading between prosumers of a local energy community with PV systems and battery energy storage systems (BESSs) is developed. The community members are characterized by their individual willingness-to-pay for purchasing PV electricity generated by the community, which reflects their ambitions to reduce marginal emissions from the grid. By adding the willingness-to-pay, prosumers do not prefer their own PV generation over the community’s generation. The objective function of the optimization model maximizes the social welfare, which means maximizing the self- consumption of the entire community and optimally allocating generation between prosumers. The method is applied to community set-ups including households and small businesses. Results of an arbitrary case-study show improvements in the overall profitability of the PV systems and BESSs. BESSs further decrease imports from the grid by 15% due to flexibilities. The willingness-to-pay is a promising tool to save marginal emissions from the grid, and the case-study shows annual savings of up to 38%. The results show that the community set-up is able to sustain without any subsidies and it can compete in the electricity market