Toward Green Residential Systems: Is Cooperation the Way Forward?

Achieving self-sustainability has been one of the key challenges in designing smart grid connected residential systems. Solar enabled and power grid connected, dual-powered residential systems is an attractive solution, but it is not carbon free and cost optimal for the end user. This paper proposes temporal energy cooperation among the dual-powered residences as a potential cost and energy efficient solution. Through this paper, we present a microgrid based, multi-residence cooperative energy transfer mechanism to offset the power grid dependency. The developed analytical framework characterizes the green energy storage as a discrete time Markov model and aims to exploit the temporal residential load variations, towards designing self-sustainable systems at a much lower capital expenditure (CAPEX). Our simulation results capture the variation of optimum residence cluster size as a function of energy sharing price and load skewness to become cost profitable. The results also demonstrate a significant reduction in CAPEX, achieved through the proposed energy cooperative framework, over a non-cooperative residential system.