Towards an Approach for Household Energy Monitoring and Visualisation to Enable Sustainable Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading

Energy systems are currently undergoing a rapid generational and non-reversible change from centralised fossil fuel power plants with national grid distribution to renewable, decentralised systems that are both sustainable and resilient. One promising area of activity is the development of microgrids that can be established on-demand in areas where the power supply is inadequate/ not available. Microgrids enable the possibility of peer-to-peer energy trading and exchange between physically closely located groups of households/ buildings. To achieve this, not only the physical infrastructure but also the supporting software and systems need to be developed and investigated. In this paper, we propose an architecture to allow the monitoring of energy generation and consumption in the household, which is the first step to enabling peer-to-peer energy trading. We demonstrate that with current off-the-shelf technology, it is feasible to monitor and present the current state of a household's energy resources. The ultimate goal is to provide insights and recommendations for the effective deployment and operation of distributed energy resources in future smart grid systems.