IoT-Based energy sharing model for sizing storage systems in energy communities

In recent years, the exploitation of weather-dependent renewable energy sources, available at distributed local sites, has led to the increased volatility of electrical energy supply. In order to compensate for the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources and remedy to possible imbalance problems on the national grids, the users of the electricity system are required to reduce interactions with the grid and increase the self-consumption of energy. Accordingly, prosumers equipped with local generation and storage systems, and enriched with the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, are encouraged to join the energy communities, as they can produce, store and share energy with the other members of the community. The proper sizing of storage systems is essential in this context. This paper presents an IoT-based management model that exploits the energy sharing among the prosumers of a community, with the aim of evaluating the impact of the storage systems' sizes on the energy self-consumption and on the cost savings that can be achieved.