Privacy preserving renewable energy trading system for residential communities

This paper proposes a new trading framework for enabling energy trading between end energy customers and a small-capacity Renewable Energy Plant (REP) in urban environments. To relieve the communication burden incurred by a large number of end customers who submit bids to purchase energy from the REP, the energy trading process is designed on a community basis. The end customers are grouped into multiple communities. With this approach, the proposed energy trading system coordinates the REP, the community energy management system in each community, and the local energy management system of each customer. The homomorphic encryption technology is integrated into the energy trading framework to enable the energy trading to be performed and settled without exposing individual customer's bidding energy purchase price and amount values. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed system.