A Smart Energy Hub for Smart Cities: Enabling Peer-to-Peer Energy Sharing and Trading

This article presents an architecture of a smart energy hub (SEH) for smart cities from the perspectives of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy sharing and trading. The proposed architecture is developed by considering energy generation and consumption profiles of different facilities (residential, commercial, industrial, and community services) within smart cities. The opportunities for P2P energy sharing and trading in a SEH depend on the information exchange among different facilities (i.e., communication infrastructure), output power regulation capabilities of distributed energy resources (DERs) that supply power to different facilities (i.e., controllability of DERs) and energy trading framework (i.e., strategies for sellers and buyers). The architecture of the proposed SEH is developed by considering all these features in order to comprehensively cover all aspects related to the P2P energy sharing and trading.