Peer-to-peer electricity trading in grid-connected residential communities with household distributed photovoltaic

With the rapid development of distributed electricity generation technologies such as solar photovoltaics, peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity trading is attracting incremental attention due to the pursuit of decentralized energy autonomy and further economic benefits. The study presented in this paper aims to gain a better understanding of the community P2P electricity trading, including influence of trading strategies, determinants of trading quantity and price, and further factors affecting improvement in community energy welfare. The market mechanism is determined based on the discriminatory continuous double auction, followed by simulations of the trading process in well-designed cases. Results show that P2P trading price and quantity depend on variation of the supply–demand ratio during each trading period, by which in the absence of complex trading strategies and learning abilities, profits are able to be effectively and fairly allocated among participants. For a given community, the total profits that could be obtained from P2P electricity trading are influenced by many factors, and the key is to make those “ineffective supply” available in the P2P market again, through active energy management solutions on all residents rather than focusing only on prosumers’ self-consumption in the past. The ensuing results make significant sense as regards better understanding both the benefits and limitations of P2P electricity trading in residential communities or other similar scenes, thus helping for guiding practical implementation.