Trading on local energy markets: A comparison of market designs and bidding strategies

Increasing renewable energy sources and innovative information and communication systems open up new challenges and opportunities to integrate distributed generation into the energy supply system. Formerly centralized energy systems need to be adapted to take full advantage of the immense potential of decentralized energy generation and smart, interconnected energy end users. We introduce a local electricity market on which prosumers and consumers of a community are able to trade electricity directly amongst each other. This local electricity market supports the local integration of renewable energy generation. It facilitates a local balance of energy supply and demand and hence reduces the need for extensive electricity transmission. We introduce, evaluate and compare two local market designs, a direct peer-to-peer market and a closed order book market, as well as two agent behaviors, zero-intelligence agents and intelligently bidding agents. We derive four scenarios by combining each market design with each agent behavior, respectively. All market scenarios offer similar economic advantages for the market participants. However, the peer-to-peer market with intelligent agents appears to be the most advantageous as it results in the lowest average overall electricity price.