Economic Interactions Between Autonomous Photovoltaic Owners in a Local Energy Market

Solar photovoltaic (PV) is becoming one of the most significant renewable sources for positive energy district (PED) in Sweden. The lacks of innovative business models and financing mechanisms are the main constraints for PV’s deployment installed in local community. This chapter therefore proposes a peer-to-peer (P2P) business model for 48 individual building prosumers with PV installed in a Swedish community. It considers energy use behaviour, electricity/financial flows, ownerships and trading rules in a local electricity market. Different local electricity markets are designed and studied using agent-based modelling technique, with different energy demands, cost–benefit schemes, and financial hypotheses for an optimal evaluation. This chapter provides an early insight into a vast research space, i.e. the operation of an energy system through the constrained interaction of its constituting agents. The agents (48 households) show varying abilities in exploiting the common PV resource, as they achieve very heterogeneous self-sufficiency levels (from ca. 15% to 30%). The lack of demand side management suggests that social and lifestyle differences generate huge impacts on the ability to be self-sufficient with a shared, limited PV resource. Despite the differences in self-sufficiency, the sheer energy amount obtained from the shared PV correlates mainly with annual cumulative demand.