Selling from Behind the Meter: Making Sense of Community and Peer-to-Peer Markets for Distributed Energy Trading

With the rise of distributed energy resources (DERs) located behind the customer’s meter, the question of how to monetize the electricity provided by these resources has grown more pressing. Several different approaches have emerged, including peer-to-peer energy trading, DER markets, community energy sharing, and virtual power plants – each with their own merits and limitations. We predict what the long-term solution to selling electricity from behind the meter will be and evaluate today’s developers in that context, finding that few are building the right tools and establishing the right partnerships to enable the markets of the future.