A Novel Community-based Photovoltaic Energy Sharing Business Model Incorporated in Decentralized Energy Markets

As a promising solution to energy transition and energy cost reduction, distributed photovoltaic (PV) has become one of the key technologies for low-carbon energy system. However, due to the long financial return cycle, space constraints, policy uncertainty, and inefficient current management schemes, etc, its potential for acting as an energy supply alternative are yet to be manifested and implemented in practice, especially for the individual community residents. this paper presents a community-based PV energy sharing business model based on a shareholding system, which can stimulate the participation of residents in distributed PV capacity sharing under the regulation of a PV service provider. Specifically, the residents can obtain the usufruction of PV capacity on-demand through shares transfer, and energy generated by shared PV can be shared via decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions and local energy community market (LECM). On this basis, an incentive and penalty mechanism is designed to ensure the efficient use of the PV capacities and a day-ahead decision-making strategy is established to maximize the individual resident's benefits. Finally, extensive case studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed model.