The role of energy storage in local energy markets

To facilitate the integration of renewable electricity sources into the energy system, innovative market designs must be discussed. Local markets that are organized in a decentralized fashion can help to decrease the need for extensive investment in transmission capacity. To analyze such markets, this work presents an agent-based simulation study of a local peer-to-peer electricity market in a community. The market offers a decentralized marketplace for procuring electricity directly from local renewable generation. We evaluate the market efficiency in terms of the attained rate of self-consumption and the average electricity price depending on the number of potential trading partners in two scenarios: A local market without energy storage and a local market with a community energy storage. The results indicate that a community energy storage can substantially increase the market's efficiency.