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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 gener-ation units and electric batteries to enable access to electricity. At present, these resources are operated in isolation, fulfilling individ-ual home needs, which results in an inefficient and costly use of resources, especially in the case of electric batteries which are ex-pensive 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 prolong-ing 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 coali-tional game where each agent’s contribution to both surpluses is computed using the Shapley value. Using real world data, we em-pirically evaluate our solution to show that energy exchange (i) can reduce the need for battery charging (by close to 65%) in a com-munity and (ii) can improve the efficient use of energy (by up to 80 % under certain conditions). In addition, we show how approx-imated Shapley values can be used to enable energy exchange in large communities.
Alam et al. (Mon,) studied this question.