Our system takes a ‘community’ view of local supply and local demand for any given half-hourly period and does the matching on an equitable basis with a view to matching as much local supply with local demand as possible. In your simplified example with 1 producer and 3 purchasers, let’s assume:
- 5kWh of excess produced by Producer A
- 4kWh consumed by Purchaser B
- 3kWh consumed by Purchaser C
- 2kWh consumed by Purchaser D
Overall, then, we have 5kWh of local supply and 9kWh of local demand. Each purchaser has a % of the local demand and therefore gets allocated an equitable proportion of local supply in accordance with their share of demand. This matching process occurs automatically – neither the purchaser nor the producer has to do anything. The remaining 4kWh of demand that cannot be supplied locally must be purchased from the grid / wholesale market. Reality is obviously significantly more complex, but the basic principles here hold across all scenarios.
However, our system also allows a producer to ‘reserve’ a % of their excess to gift to specific members in their community for 1, 2, 3 or 4 weeks (it’s on our roadmap in the coming months to add a permanent / set & forget option here too). Using the above simplified example again, let’s say that Producer A reserved up to 25% of their excess for Recipient E. Then, assuming
Recipient E’s demand allows, 1.25kWh would be gifted to them by Producer A. And this would leave 3.75kWh to be shared out across Purchasers B, C & D.