Enabling sustainable energy sharing and tracking for rural energy communities in emerging economies

Abstract

Presently Rural Energy Communities (REC) are faced with challenges such as the inefficient distribution of energy from Renewable Energy Sources (RES), unfair pricing, and the inclusion of prosumers into the electricity market. Therefore, this article proposed an approach that employed enabling technologies such as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), self-enforcing smart contracts-enabled Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for sustainable energy sharing and tracking in REC. Additionally, a model is proposed based on key factors that influence the adoption of enabling technologies in REC. For the methodology qualitative data is collected from secondary sources and descriptive analysis is employed to present the key findings. Key findings from this study contributes to develop a decarbonized, decentralized, and digitized energy management approach to support the sustainability of REC. The deployment of AI can facilitate prediction short-term energy planning for RES production and consumption based on real-time data from IoT devices. More importantly, findings from this study presents use case scenarios of energy sharing and tracking, and green electric vehicle charging in REC suggesting that DLT based smart contracts, IoT, and AI offers an effective approach to accelerate the sharing and tracking of RES in REC. Besides, DLT and smart contracts enables real-time electricity consumption monitoring, energy trading management, and pricing.