Local electricity markets are increasingly seen as a key factor in democratising the energy system. While there has been a significant amount of research on the technical and economic aspects of these markets, it is still not clear how well they align with the social acceptance of potential participants. The concept of fairness in these markets has been gaining attention, but there has not been a clear discussion or definition of what constitutes fairness in a local electricity market context. Furthermore, some fairness indicators have become popular in the literature on local electricity markets, but have yet to be fully analysed on how well they capture fairness in these markets. This study aims to address these issues by formally defining distributive energy justice in the context of local electricity markets and evaluating how well popular fairness indicators perform based on this definition. The results of this extensive evaluation lead to proposed adjustments to the indicators to make them more suitable for local electricity markets, and a discussion on future research directions for fairness in local electricity markets.

For local energy markets to become a widely accepted, real-life phenomenon, the models must extend beyond the techno-economical aspects and energy justice within these market structures must be thoroughly addressed. To measure the perceived fairness of a local energy market, some studies have adapted fairness indicators originated from other fields. However, it is still unclear how these indicators can accurately reflect distributional fairness in various local energy trading scenarios. This study conducts a comprehensive review and qualitative assessment of the existing fairness indicators in the local energy market literature and their ability to accurately capture different situations in the market. The study results in a discussion on their strength and limitations, and an encouragement to alter the indicators to better quantify energy justice in a local energy market context.

Local energy communities and electricity markets have emerged as possibilities for interaction among prosumers. A substantial effort has been invested into creating efficient pricing mechanisms for various market arrangements, all of which take into consideration distinct characteristics of local electricity trading. However, since they are all evaluated in terms of various systems and market conditions, it is challenging to directly compare the mechanisms. In this research, three well-established pricing mechanisms from the literature are systematically compared and evaluated under identical settings on their influence on welfare distribution across various market participant groups, privacy protection, transparency and complexity level. According to the findings, the supply-demand ratio pricing system leads to the lowest costs for consumers and is also the most privacy compliant and transparent. Furthermore, prosumers obtain the highest cost-savings through the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers pricing mechanism, whereas the equilibrium pricing mechanism performs best regarding economic fairness. The aim of this article is to provide insight into the performance of different pricing mechanisms to energy regulators and local electricity market facilitators. The comparative analysis should aid in making informed decisions on the implementation of local electricity markets.

The power system and markets have become increasingly complex along with an effort to digitalize the energy sector. Accessing flexibility services, in particular, through digital energy platforms, has enabled communication between multiple entities within the energy system and streamlined flexibility market operations. However, digitalizing these vast and complex systems introduces new cybersecurity and privacy concerns, which must be properly addressed during the design of the digital energy platform ecosystems. In this study, the potential and operation of digital flexibility platforms are reviewed, and a generic architecture with/without a combined distributed ledger technology framework is proposed. Finally, concerns about cybersecurity and privacy on digital energy platforms are discussed.

The Digital Green Transition of the energy industry is accelerating as decarbonization and digitalization of the power market and system are gaining momentum. Unlocking the full and real potential of local energy markets is among the opportunities to be demystified in the coming years, with blockchain technology being a prominent enabler. Important subcomponents such as functional and fair local energy pricing mechanisms and management algorithms will be required for next-generation digital local energy trading and management platforms. Even though rapid digitalization of the energy sector offers considerable advantages, it also increases the cyber-physical risk levels of energy systems in general. The proposed framework of this paper accommodates considerable undiscovered aspects of democratization of the energy systems and future digital shared economy conventions. Nevertheless, privacy concerns must be addressed in tandem with the cyber-physical security of local energy markets and their ecosystem. This work proposes a joint privacy and cyber-physical security framework designed for local energy markets to improve cyber-physical resilience. All related parts, such as blockchain technology and self-sovereign identity, are used in an organized way to create a possible solution.