Review of energy sharing: Business models, mechanisms, and prospects

Abstract

Abstract The development of distributed generation technology is endowing consumers the ability to produce energy and transforming them into “prosumers”. This transformation shall improve energy efficiency and pave the way to a low‐carbon future. However, it also exerts critical challenges on system operations, such as the wasted backups for volatile renewable generation and the difficulty to predict behaviour of prosumers with conflicting interests and privacy concerns. An emerging business model to tackle these challenges is energy sharing, whose concepts, structures, applications, models, and designs are thoroughly reviewed in this paper, with an outlook of future research to better realise its potentials.