Pricing decisions in peer-to-peer and prosumer-centred electricity markets: Experimental analysis in Germany and the United Kingdom

Ulf Hahnel and Michael Fell

Abstract

Prosumer-centred electricity market models such as peer-to-peer communities can enable optimized supply and demand of locally generated electricity as well as an active participation of citizens in the energy transition. An important element of active participation is the improved ability of community members to identify and choose who they transact with in a much more granular way than is usual. Despite this key novelty and the social core of prosumer-centred markets, little is known about how citizens would trade with different actors involved in the system. Here, we report a preregistered cross-national experiment in which we investigated individual trading preferences in a peer-to-peer community, including a variety of private and non-private trading actors.

Our data from the United Kingdom (n=441) and Germany (n=440) shows that set buying and selling prices strongly vary, pointing to three systematically different trading strategies that individuals apply as a function of involved trading actor. Findings moreover reveal that trading decisions are determined by individuals’ political orientation, place attachment, and climate change beliefs as well as individual differences in trust in the involved trading actor. Finally, our results illustrate high consistency in trading preferences across nations. However, nation-level differences emerged when decisions were made publicly visible, emphasising the need to consider context-effects in peer-to-peer system design. Our results have implications for the development of prosumer-centred energy models and the design of interventions to increase citizen participation across national contexts.

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