Mitigation of Communication Costs in Peer-to-peer Electricity Markets

Peer-to-peer markets are a promising approach for integrating decentralized generation and prosumers into electricity markets. However, these markets require a very large number of messages to be exchanged in order to find a solution that respects the constraint of power balance in power systems. This study first establishes the shape of the compromise between communication costs and residual power imbalance resulting from a P2P market. Secondly alternative stopping criteria are proposed in order to reduce the cost of communication. The most effective approach is to ratify each trade independently using a threshold on its primary and dual residues, while continuing to negotiate the other trades. With the same residual imbalance, this stopping criterion results in a tenfold reduction of the number of messages exchanged on the basis of a Monte Carlo simulation. This reduction factor seems independent of the number of market participants.