1.Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China;2.State Key Laboratory of Power System and Generation Equipments, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

The prevalence of distributed renewable energy provides a new way to construct clean and efficient smart grids. Meanwhile, it also leads to some difficulties at the demand side such as more random behaviors of end users, more difficult energy management, and less efficient equipment utilization. To deal with these new challenges and fully invoke demand-side flexibility, energy sharing which is an innovative distributed operation paradigm emerges as a response. This paper presents the concept of demand-side energy sharing and analyzes its potential in smoothing uncertainty, enhancing operation economy and improving equipment utilization efficiency. The key points and basic requirements in designing energy sharing mechanism are elaborated. On this basis, the domestic and international research on energy sharing mechanism design is summarized into five categories from the perspectives of cooperative game and non-cooperative game. Current research progress and remaining problems are also concluded. Further, future research direction is previewed from two aspects, i.e. the internal design and external connection of the demand-side energy sharing market.

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China-State Grid Corporation of China Joint Fund for Smart Grid (No. U1966601) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U1766203).