IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 44

1. Definition of
Community-Groups
Input

Output

Historic Energy
Profiles

2. Prosumer
Recruitment
New Prosumers

3. Goal Definition

Prosumer's Assessment
Criteria
Behaviours

Multiple Conflicting
Objectives

Segmentation
of Profiles

Prosumer
Evaluation

Negotiation

Characterize Groups
with Prequalification
Criteria

Identify Dynamic
Prosumers

Achievable Goal for
Each Community-Group

Effective ProsumerCommunity Groups

Sustainable Group
Formation and
Growth

4. Ranking of Members

Prosumer Ranking

Inspired Goal-Oriented
Members

Identify Influential
Members by Ranking
Fair
Privilege Assignment

Fig.2. Proposals to address the challenges.

The key motivations behind the
emergence of prosumer community
groups are as follows. First, if an
individual prosumer finds a group
of prosumers with similar energy
behaviors, then an opt-in sort of
prosumer community group can be
established, in which they increase
the quantity of energy to be sold,
and enhance the bargaining power in
their own energy market. This would
enable the smaller players, i.e., the
prosumers, to have negotiating power
on par with that of the big players,
i.e., the providers, and eliminate the
gap dividing them. Secondly, the
goal-oriented nature of the community group attains a reliable supply of
energy to the energy buyers. Overall,
the prosumer community groups lead
a sustainable energy-sharing process,
and create a dynamic ecosystem
of cooperating prosumers. We will
further discuss the benefits that the
society can gain though this concept
later, in the "Discussion" section.
A technological overview of
prosumer community groups is
illustrated in Fig.1. As shown, the
distributed domestic energy generation sources, as well as the energy
consuming household appliances, of
multiple residential prosumers are
connected to each other via a Home
Area Network (HAN). The HAN
is further linked to the local power
distribution network through smart
metering infrastructures (SMI),
44

forming a local area network, where
the prosumers and utility grid communicate. For instance, prosumers
who generate energy using solar
sources and produce surplus energy
between 10 kW to 50 kW have been
aggregated into community group1.
The prosumers who generate energy
using solar and wind sources and
produce surplus energy between
51 kW to 100 kW have been
joined together to make community group2. The community groups
interact with each other and with the
utility grid through the community
gateway, which is a smart, intermediate node that bridges the utility
grid with smart devices of each distributed energy resource belonging
to a community group. The smart
storage represents a storage facility
that can temporarily store excess or
unused electricity, which can be utilized to offload the energy consumption of the members of prosumer
community group as required. Furthermore, such a community based
energy sharing network is managed
by central operation platform, called
a community management platform.
Considering the internal guidelines of this model, note that each
prosumer community group is associated with a prequalification criteria
defined by the group. Each prosumers should agree with the defined
prequalification criteria in order to
obtain membership. Further, the

members of a community group
are inspired to achieve the mutually
decided goal, which can be different from other community groups.
For instance, one community group
may want to gain high profits by
selling the energy to the utility grid,
another group may attempt to reduce
emissions or energy costs, etc. The
community groups of prosumers
can collectively utilize their unused
energy to either i) offload their
energy demand or ii) auction off their
unused energy to the other energy
buyers (such as individual consumers, retailers, or the main utility grid).
For the prosumer community
groups to emerge and be able to
meaningfully interact with the
smart grid infrastructure, several
challenges have to be addressed.
Some of them are considered to be
deployed as a core part of the smart
grid, some exist in other contexts
(e.g., online communities), while
others will need to be developed.
Additionally, integration among all
of these aspects will have to be realized with the energy as target focus
area. Next we address four key
challenges involved with managing
prosumer community groups.

Four Key Challenges
in Managing Prosumer
Community Groups
Managing prosumer community
groups is challenging. Hereby, we

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SprING 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014