Sharing electricity storage

The emerging sharing economy has disrupted the housing and transportation sectors. The underlining business model exploits underutilized infrastructure through sharing. In this paper, we explore sharing economy opportunities in electricity sector. There are considerable obstacles to sharing electricity. First, the flow of electricity is governed by Kirchoff's Laws and we cannot prescribe a point to point path for its flow. Second, regulatory and policy obstacles may impede sharing opportunities. As a result, early adopters will be in the context of behind-the-meter sharing opportunities. In this paper, we study one of these opportunities. Specifically, we consider a collection of firms that invest in storage to arbitrage against the time of use pricing they face. We show that the investment decision of the firms form a Nash equilibrium which supports the social welfare. We offer explicit expressions for optimal storage investments and equilibrium prices for shared storage in a spot market. Finally, we use field data to assess the performance of our proposed sharing scheme.