Advanced Clustering Approach for Peer-to-Peer Local Energy Markets Considering Prosumers’ Preference Vectors

Abstract

Local energy markets (LEMs) are utilized in a bottom-up power systems approach for reducing the complexity of the traditional, centralized power system and to enable better integration of decentralized renewable energy resources (RES). Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading creates opportunities for prosumers to trade their RES with other prosumers in the LEM. Although several scenarios were proposed in the literature for modelling P2P energy trading, there is still a gap in the literature considering the heterogeneous characteristics of prosumers' bidding preferences during P2P matching in the LEM. In this paper, we present heterogeneous characteristics of bidding preferences for prosumers considering energy quantity, bid/offer price, geographic location, location of agents on the local community and cluster welfare. Moreover, this paper proposes an advanced clustering model for P2P matching in the energy community considering the heterogeneous characteristics of bidding preferences for prosumers. For evaluating our proposed model performance, two German real case scenarios of a small and large communities were studied. The simulations results show that using price preference, as the criterion for clustering, offers more technical and economic benefits to energy communities compared to other clustering scenarios. On the other hand, clustering scenarios based on location of prosumers ensure that energy is traded among prosumers who are closer to each other.INDEX TERMS Energy community, advanced clustering, local energy market, matching mechanism, Peerto-peer trading.