A Game-Theoretical Incentive Mechanism for Local Energy Communities

Local energy communities (LECs) are structures based on the collaboration of neighbouring prosumers for suiting their energy requests. Prosumers are users participating in the community, which are able to produce energy rather than just consuming it. These communities have the purpose to incentivize usage of renewable energy. Inside them, it is possible to have members that trade energy in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion: prosumer can trade their energy surplus with consumers, so that profits remain inside the community and energy is not unnecessarily taken from outside, which avoids strain on the grid and transmission losses. In this work, the goal is to create a game theory model of a P2P market for LECs which takes into account the behavior of prosumers, assuming each of them will aim for their own benefit. The model has the objective to incentivize prosumers to self-consume their own energy, and balance as much as possible production and consumption through the community. The proposed model is described and analyzed with respect to other existing models with similar purposes, both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Results show that our model obtains good performances in all the analyzed aspects, outperforming existing ones.