A sharing economy for residential communities with PV-coupled battery storage: Benefits, pricing and participant matching

Abstract

Abstract The transition of the energy sector towards more decentral, renewable and digital structures and a higher involvement of local residents as prosumers calls for innovative business models. In this paper, we investigate a sharing economy model that enables a residential community to share solar generation and storage capacity. We simulate 520 sharing communities of five households each with differing load profile configurations and find that they achieve average annual savings of 615€ as compared to individual operation. Using the gathered data on electricity consumption in a sharing community, we discuss a fixed pricing approach to achieve a fair distribution of the profits generated through the sharing economy. We further investigate the impact of prosumers’ and consumers’ load profile patterns on the profitability of the sharing communities. Based on these findings, we explore the potential to match and coordinate suitable communities through a platform-based sharing economy model. Our results enable practitioners to find optimal additions to an energy sharing community and provide new insights for researchers regarding possible pricing schemes in energy communities.