Geographical Peer Matching for P2P Energy Sharing

Significant cost reductions attract ever more households to invest in small-scale renewable electricity generation and storage. Such distributed resources are not used in the most effective way when only used individually, as sharing them provides even greater cost savings. Energy Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have thus been shown to be beneficial for prosumers and consumers through reductions in energy cost while also being attractive to grid or service providers. However, many practical challenges have to be overcome before all players could gain in having efficient and automated local energy communities; such challenges include the inherent complexity of matching together geographically distributed peers and the significant computations required to calculate the local efficient matching options. We define and analyze in this work a precise mathematical modeling of the geographical peer matching problem, and demonstrate the inherent intractability of the problem, highlighting its high computational cost and underscoring the critical need for scalable approaches that effectively balance performance trade-offs as system size grows. Furthermore, we propose and study analytically and empirically a spectrum of approaches to address it and perform a cost-efficient matching of peers in a computationally efficient fashion. Our experimental study, based on real-world energy data, demonstrates that our proposed solutions are efficient both in terms of cost savings achieved by the peers and in terms of communication and computing requirements. Our scalable algorithms thus provide one core building block for practical and data-efficient peer-to-peer energy sharing communities within large-scale optimization systems.