Peer to Peer Business Model Approach for Renewable Energy Cooperatives

Power and energy systems are undergoing unprecedented change driven by many factors like global warming, digitalization, new sorts of renewable energy sources (RESs). Many countries incentivize the installation of RESs with subsidies and programs like a high rate of feed-in tariffs. However, these promotions are not sustainable. Some countries started to decrease the feed-in tariffs due to the cost of RESs are in decline. Since they want to reduce the volatility risk of small-scale RESs, they also don't give capacity for unlicensed plants. Renewable energy cooperatives (RECs) emerge as an alternative to encourage the installation of unlicensed RESs. They can be defined as prosumers in the system. Also, a peer to peer energy trading between cooperatives within the local community might increase the profit of cooperative in the same region. Because of this, the peer to peer business model approach is proposed in this study. The smart contract by using blockchain technology is used in this proposed approach due to making transactions faster, and to provide a dynamic market and blockchain is used to make transactions data secure.