Prosumer Based Economic Model for Energy Sharing between Microgrids in a Rural Indian Village Scenario

Abstract

This paper presents an economic prosumer model for standalone rural microgrids operating in the Indian village Dharnai, to improve their load servicing and provide economic benefits to the community. This model clusters the standalone microgrid entities and enables prosumer to prosumer (P2P) energy sharing to efficiently utilize the excess energy. The pro-posed model is simulated on a group of six standalone microgrid entities operating in Dharnai, which consists of an irrigation system, school, health centre, two colonies and a bungalow. The constraints that govern the model are custom tailored to suit the socio-economic conditions in the village, making the model a two variable optimization between load servicing performance and overall cash flow. The implementation of this model results in the farmers being benefited from a relative efficiency increase of 8.13% at no expense. The school gets a relative efficiency rise of 7.73% and also makes a substantial income of Rs.7,703.35/year while healthcare reaches an efficiency of 98.28%. The residential loads comprising of two colonies and a bungalow gets a relative improvement in their load servicing by 8.59%, 8.96% and 5.16% respectively, at a nominal expense. This proposed model is comprehensive and can be implemented in any such group of standalone microgrids by suitably varying it’s optimization constraints.