• Impact 1: To track and visualize electricity generation and load across the university buildings thereby showcasing the total consumption of renewable resources and grid imports. This enables participants and the application host to get insights into their usage patterns and incentivizes increased engagement with the P2P community.
• Impact 2: By fostering a sharing economy, the goal is to lower the average electricity costs. This is achieved by enabling the sale of surplus electricity to community peers at rates more attractive than standard grid prices. This incentivizes additional participants to join the community and extend benefits.
• Impact 3: Support of a specific participant (CMU Smart Building) to become a net-zero emitter of GHG. The platform enables the Smart Building to receive the highest share of renewable energy of any building thereby increasing its self-sufficiency with local energy to a maximum extent.
• Impact 4: Incentivising the installation of additional renewable energy resources through more beneficial return on investment conditions through the opportunity to sell surplus energy at higher P2P rates rather than usual feed-in rates thereby increasing the overall installed solar PV capacity across the university.

The project aims to create an automated P2P trading community where all participants benefit from engaging with their peers. The overarching goal is the demonstration of P2P energy trading across participants who belong to one entity but have unique energy-related requirements and together maximize the utilization of DER installations of the prosumers in the project. The project evaluates the specific needs of all participants and provides real-time optimization of energy usage across the campus.

In addition, the platform enhances engagement by presenting load and generation profiles along with trading data through user-friendly interfaces, aiming to motivate participant involvement and fostering a closely connected energy community that satisfies its energy needs from the bottom up rather than relying fully on the backup grid and fossil-dominated electricity.

By leveraging surplus energy among peers and utilizing intuitive interfaces, the platform aims to increase renewable energy awareness and encourage a more interconnected energy community with an agreed allocation of renewable energy between faculties and buildings and real-time tracking. 

Altogether, the main objectives include replacing expensive grid electricity with alternative energy sources based on renewables and increasing the self-sufficiency of the community with local energy to a maximum extent. The project’s success hinges on creating a comprehensive digital platform that efficiently oversees and analyzes both the energy exchanges and the financial transactions associated with energy generation and consumption within the CMU smart campus.

Mr. Bundit Sapianchai, Former BCPG President and CEO:
“Our project is about exploring what’s possible. It’s a microcosm of how the city will operate with clean distributed energy”. Link

Understanding of the on-site setup: Having better documentation, to understand how the on-site configuration was set up, particularly the positioning of meters and their connection to the grid.

Software configuration and interfaces between systems: The issues related to readings transfer and accuracy of readings revealed that the interoperability of systems and functioning of all related infrastructure has to be determined ahead of project implementation to avoid multiple rounds of readings transfer and solution design.

Generally, the project is still in an early stage of live trading, the full impact will be investigated at a later stage but some high level contributions have been analyzed. 

What outcomes are anticipated from the pilot? The main outcome anticipated is a contribution to CMU’s transition to a smart campus utilizing a maximum of locally generated renewable energy.

• Additionally, the pilot project was designed to explore how P2P energy trading could assist certain sections of the university in reaching carbon neutrality.

What outcomes were delivered by the pilot?

• By conducting an in-depth analysis of a typical business-as-usual scenario, including the cost of energy from both financial and emissions viewpoints, the pilot demonstrates that carbon neutrality is achievable through P2P trading, resulting in savings in both money and emissions.