3.3.4. Technological Infrastructure

Known technological progression factors are conditions for either the energy or the information infrastructure (Table 5). There is a disparity among use-cases: while renewable EC factors are mostly regulatory, economic or social, peer-to-peer markets and demand-response communities pose unique technical criteria. It is crucial for markets, to operate on a low-voltage distribution grid—microgrid—that can function both in island mode and connected to the wider grid [49,53]. When infrastructure exists, distributing production in an energy market introduces three technical challenges: (1) upscaling multi-directional energy flows, (2) the diversification of energy supply and (3) upscaling of market actors [53]. The latter is also true for demand-response communities, as it essentially creates a market for flexibility services [35]. Scaling energy flows is a concern for grid operation, necessitating some mechanism to predict and to handle grid congestion, maintain grid balance and assure the supply of adequate quality energy.

**Table 5.** Progression factors stemming from technological infrastructure.


Apart from the grid itself, EC use-cases such as P2P energy markets have unique challenges regarding ICT infrastructure to enable intra- and inter-EC transactions [106]. Scaling market size in terms of actors is on the one hand a—currently unresolved—computational challenge of handling negotiations and consensus mechanisms, but on the other hand it is also an optimization problem of multiple peer preferences and the market as a whole [35,53]. Most importantly, this includes minimization of the total transaction costs by regulating energy flows based on the dynamism of demand and supply, and integrating system-level optimum with the optimum of individual behaviour, expectations, preferences. Peer level input, including the assertion of their rights must also be extracted and processed, and in a way that it does not compromise their privacy.
