PV sharing in local communities: Peer-to-peer trading under consideration of the prosumers' willingness-to-pay

Distributed on-site PV generation enables traditional consumers to become active participants in a decentralized energy system. In this work, a linear program optimizing peer-to-peer trading between prosumers of a local energy community with PV systems and battery energy storage systems (BESSs) is developed. The community members are characterized by their individual willingness-to-pay for purchasing PV electricity generated by the community, which reflects their ambitions to reduce marginal emissions from the grid. By adding the willingness-to-pay, prosumers do not prefer their own PV generation over the community?s generation. The objective function of the optimization model maximizes the social welfare, which means maximizing the self consumption of the entire community and optimally allocating generation between prosumers. The method is applied to community set-ups including households and small businesses. Results of an arbitrary case-study show improvements in the overall profitability of the PV systems and BESSs. BESSs further decrease imports from the grid by 15% due to flexibilities. The willingness-to-pay is a promising tool to save marginal emissions from the grid, and the case-study shows annual savings of up to 38%. The results show that the community set-up is able to sustain without any subsidies and it can compete in the electricity market.