Comparison of Community-Market Designs: Centralized and Peer-to-peer Trading

The rapid development of distributed energy resources has brought in challenges to the real-time balance between electricity supply and demand. In this context, a suitable market design not only solves the problem of resource allocation, but also maximizes social welfare. This paper compares two typical community market designs: centralized manager-based energy market and the peer-to-peer energy trading. Both the model of the manager-based energy market and a continuous double auction based peer-to-peer trading are presented. In case studies, we quantitatively compare these two market designs in terms of social welfare, total payment, and energy trading volume. The results indicate that the manager based energy market facilitates trading energy within the community and, if necessary, with external communities, but it requires collecting information of every market participants and has to solve a centralized optimization problem. In contrast, for an energy self-sustaining community, peer-to-peer energy trading might be a superb design because it is decentralized, flexible, and privacy-preserving.