A Fair Payment Scheme for Virtuous Community Energy Usage

In this work, we face a payment estimation problem that involves a community of users and an energy distributor (or producer). Our aim is to compute payments for every user in the community according to the single user’s consumption, the community’s consumption and the available energy. The proposed scheme influences the community in consuming in a virtuous way. In order to reach this goal, our payment function distributes incentives if the consumption is lower than the produced energy and penalties when the consumption exceeds the resources threshold. Our model satisfies efficiency and fairness properties both from the community (efficiency as an economic equilibrium among sellers and buyers) and the single user (fairness as an economic measure of energy good-behaving) points of view. By computing community-dependent energy bills, our model stimulates a virtuous users’ behaviour so that it approaches the production threshold as close as possible. We also provide a simulation based on real data referring to a dataset of buildings in California State, thus, showing several possible shapes of our payment scheme.