Energy Collectives: A Community and Fairness Based Approach to Future Electricity Markets

TLDR

Electricity markets lag behind the shift toward decentralized, consumer‑centric power systems enabled by ICT, which empower prosumers to play a more proactive role. The study introduces energy collectives, a community‑based electricity market structure. The authors model energy collectives by simulating test cases and applying principles from communication network and distributed system analysis to evaluate community fairness. The results show that community‑level energy sharing aligns procurement with prosumers' preferences and that a supervisory third‑party can influence members while ensuring collective agreements.

Abstract

While power system organization has evolved from a hierarchical structure to a more decentralized model, electricity markets are still not up to date with the ongoing transformation towards more consumer-centric economies. As Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are broadly adopted, they allow prosumers to have a more proactive role in power system operation. This work introduces the concept of energy collectives, as a community-based electricity market structure. We find that when prosumers are allowed to share energy at community level, overall electricity procurement for the community reflects prosumers' preferences. We show that community members can be influenced by a supervisory third-party in charge of interfacing with the market and system operator and of guaranteeing the collective common agreements. We simulate a number of test cases and we apply typical principles from analysis of communication networks and distributed systems to assess community fairness.