Power Grid Network Evolutions for Local Energy Trading

Abstract: The shift towards an energy Grid dominated by prosumers (consumers and producers of energy) will inevitably have repercussions on the distribution infrastructure. Today it is a hierarchical one designed to deliver energy from large scale facilities to end-users. Tomorrow it will be a capillary infrastructure at the medium and Low Voltage levels that will support local energy trading among prosumers. In our previous work, we analyzed the Dutch Power Grid and made an initial analysis of the economic impact topological properties have on decentralized energy trading. In this paper, we go one step further and investigate how different networks topologies and growth models facilitate the emergence of a decentralized market. In particular, we show how the connectivity plays an important role in improving the properties of reliability and path-cost reduction. From the economic point of view, we estimate how the topological evolutions facilitate local electricity distribution, taking into account the main cost ingredient required for increasing network connectivity, i.e., the price of cabling.