Crowdsourcing Electric Mobility for Omni-Sharing Distributed Energy Resources

Ever-increasing coupling of energy and mobility sectors is under way in our cities. However, whether and how to use such coupling to optimize the portfolio and operations of urban energy assets has rarely been studied. We fill this gap by studying "omni-sharing,'' which is a novel business model (beyond "peer-to-peer'' energy sharing) that allows a distributed energy resource (DER) community to crowdsource electricity from ride-sharing electric vehicles (EVs). We analytically model two salient features of omni-sharing operations: the optimal payment to external ride-sharing EV drivers, and the cost allocation among internal DERs. In doing so, we enrich the existing results on newsvendor cooperative game theory by generalizing the newsvendor model with a variable underage cost structure, induced by the endogeneity of the energy-crowdsourcing cost. We prove that omni-sharing can reduce the total storage capacity needed and the expected energy cost for the DER community. Combining data on residential energy consumption and ride-sharing markets, we find that omni-sharing is able to reduce the DER community’s total cost by 10.2% and the storage capacity by 17.9% in the long run. Omni-sharing is a lucrative business model for DER communities unless a ride-sharing driver's expected income from ride-sharing is extremely high. Omni-sharing exerts mixed (but on balance positive) externalities: a significant positive effect on ride-share drivers and moderate and reducible negative effects on ride-sharing passengers and platforms. This paper strengthens our understanding about how to orchestrate strategies for the energy-mobility nexus toward enabling smart cities