Sharing Energy Storage Systems under Net Metering and Time-of-Use Pricing

Sharing economy has become a socio-economic trend in transportation and housing sectors. It develops business models leveraging underutilized resources. Like those sectors, power grid is also becoming smarter with many flexible resources, and researchers are investigating the impact of sharing resources here as well that can help to reduce cost and extract value. In this work, we investigate sharing of energy storage devices among individual households in a cooperative fashion. Coalitional game theory is used to model the scenario where utility company imposes time-of-use (ToU) price and net metering billing mechanism. The resulting game has a non-empty core and we can develop a cost allocation mechanism in the core with easy to compute analytical formula. A mechanism for sharing the excess energy under the peer to peer network (P2P) is also developed. Thus sharing electricity generated by storage devices among consumers can be effective in this set-up. Our simulation results also validate the theoretical claim.