Energy sharing community as a decentralized complex adaptive system of systems

Electricity generated from renewable energy sources (RESs) such as wind and solar is in growing demand as a result of promoting sustainability. Yet RESs are intermittent and volatile, raising new challenges to the cost-effective, reliable operation of widely installed renewable energy systems owned by various entities. These systems include distributed renewable generation units and storage devices, as well as centralized renewable energy plants and storage systems. Forming energy sharing communities locally and coordinating the participants in each community properly will improve their performance. This paper analyzes energy sharing communities from the perspective of systems engineering and identifies nine characteristics of them. Therefore, each community can be seen as a decentralized complex adaptive system of systems (DCASoS). The paper thus proposes two methods for coordinating individual communities. One is the hierarchical coordination requiring a top management at the community level to coordinate participants; the other is the peer coordination replying on the collaboration among participants. They both capture the DCASoS characteristics of energy sharing communities. The choice of one method over the other for a specific community needs to consider multiple aspects of it, such as the community size, the architecture and bandwidth of its communication network, and the reliability requirement.