Sharing Economy in Energy Markets

This book aims to incorporate an emerging successful business model, i.e., sharing economy, into energy markets, thus digging out the potential merits and applications in multi-energy sectors. With the core idea “access over ownership”, sharing economy enables the collaborative consumption of idle resources through advanced information and communications technology. One critical challenge is to identify different market participants’ occupation while accordingly designing pricing mechanisms. This book begins with an overview about the recent development of sharing economy in energy fields, and summarizes two energy market-related issues that sharing economy can hopefully address. One is how to quantify a marginal generator’s contribution and thereby elicit truthful bidding under information asymmetry condition. The other is how to distinguish renewable and distributed energy resources’ contribution and thus incentivize efficient aggregation considering increasing scale and uncertainty. Then sharing economy mechanisms are proposed and designed from a game theory perspective. On this basis, the following chapters thoroughly investigate the specific problems in spot markets, multi-area markets, renewable energy aggregation and energy systems integration. Additionally, the benefits brought by sharing economy are evaluated in terms of regional market bidding and transmission expansion deferral. Finally, the information and communications technologies related to sharing economy are modeled and analyzed. Hopefully, this book can greatly benefit the readers who are interested in energy economics and engineering.