Business and pricing models for smart energy at building level: A Review

Abstract

The transition that energy grids have undergone in recent decades has brought significant changes: grid users can now produce energy as well as consume it, allowing energy to flow in both directions. Due to this and the evolution of appliances, prosumers (users that produce and consume energy) can now shift their energy loads in time and amount, providing what is known as energy flexibility. In return, energy flexibility allows users to assist energy providers through a process known as demand response. Additionally, the ability of grid users to both produce and consume energy has led to the rise of new structures like energy communities. These innovations have paved the way for new business and pricing models, enabling prosumers to obtain benefits for assisting providers, financially exploit flexibility, and regulate interactions in energy communities. This work aims to analyze and review novel business models in smart energy. Although there are many levels at which this transition has evolved the grid, one of the main changes has been enabling buildings to become energy producers. Specifically, this paper will concentrate on three main areas of interest: energy flexibility, demand response, and energy communities. It provides a comprehensive review of novel business models related to these topics, including both relevant reviews and actual novel business or pricing models that have been proposed in the past. We defined some features to classify these papers and that we used to carry out a comparative analysis of the retrieved papers. We discuss the overall findings, highlighting common patterns and similarities between the models.