Modeling and understanding energy sharing communities: A system of systems approach

The renewable energy technology has recently advanced dramatically, accelerating the society’s pace of transitioning to a sustainable living environment. Distributed renewable energy generators and energy storage devices are widely installed, which are owned and operated by various entities. Facing intermittent and volatile renewable generations, they have recognized the need for collaborative energy management. As more and more distributed renewable generators are being connected to distribution networks, owners of the networks are under the pressure of changing their business model to adapt to the new trend. Forming sharing communities locally is a potential solution which allows the participants to share excess generations and unmet demands within their community. Forming energy sharing communities also benefits distributed networks from multiple aspects. This paper aims to develop a thorough understanding of this new business model and, meanwhile, explores an approach to the management of energy sharing communities. Through analyzing the participants of energy sharing communities, the paper first identifies nine characteristics of the communities. Accordingly, the paper justifies that cooperative sharing communities can form a decentralized complex adaptive system of systems (DCASoS). The paper further classifies the nine characteristics into two types: underlying characteristics and the derivative characteristics. The goal of managing energy sharing communities is to enhance the good effects and reduce the bad effects of the derivative characteristics given its underlying characteristics. Based on this fact, the paper develops a system of systems (SoS) approach to describing, modeling, and analyzing sharing communities, which builds a foundation for engineering the corresponding DCASoS.