Cooperative energy exchange for the efficient use of energy and resources in remote communities

Energy poverty at the household level is a serious hindrance to economic and social development, especially in off-grid, remote villages in the developing world. Some initiatives have sought to provide these households with resources such as renewable generation units and electric batteries to enable access to electricity. At present, these resources are operated in isolation, fulfilling individual home needs, which results in an inefficient and costly use of resources, especially in the case of electric batteries which are expensive and have a limited number of charging cycles. To address this problem, we investigate the exchange of energy between homes in a community to reduce the overall battery usage, thus prolonging the life of batteries. We take an agent-based approach to this problem and show that agents (acting on the behalf of households) can coordinate and regulate the exchange of energy between homes which leads to two surpluses: reduction in the overall battery usage and reduction in the energy losses. To ensure a fair distribution of these surpluses among agents, we model this problem as a coalitional game where each agent’s contribution to both surpluses is computed using the Shapley value. Using real world data, we empirically evaluate our solution to show that energy exchange (i) can reduce the need for battery charging (by close to 65%) in a community and (ii) can improve the efficient use of energy (by up to 80% under certain conditions). In addition, we show how approximated Shapley values can be used to enable energy exchange in large communities.