Energy Community Flexibility Solutions to Improve Users’ Wellbeing

Abstract

Energy communities, mostly microgrid based, are a key stakeholder of modern electrical power grids. Operating a microgrid based energy community is a challenging topic due to the involved uncertainties, complexities and often conflicting objectives. The aim of this paper is to present a novel methodology demonstrating that energy community flexibility can contribute to each community member’s wellbeing when a grid fault occurs. A three-house energy community will be modelled considering as consumption sources non-controllable and controllable devices in each house. As power supply sources, PV systems installed in a community’s houses are considered, as well as the power obtained from main grid. Each house’s flexibility inside the community will be studied to improve the management of loads during a fault occurrence. Moreover, three different scenarios will be considered with different available power in the community. With these simulations, it was possible to understand that houses’ energy flexibility can be used under a fault situation, either to maintain the users’ wellbeing or to change the energy flow. Furthermore, energy flexibility can be used to create better energy price markets, to improve the resilience of the grid, or even to consider electrical vehicles’ connection to a community’s grid.

Toward an Effective Community Energy Management by Using a Cluster Storage

“…To the best knowledge of the authors, those rare contributions which are trying to combine these approaches, mainly concentrate on issues like self-consumption optimization (e.g., [66]), taking into account the better simultaneity factors in energy communities. On the other hand, flexibility issues are explored in some new research papers, yet concentrating on user convenience aspects [67] or on market participation [68] rather than effects on the associated LV grid. However, the assessment of flexibility potentials is important for grid stability, such that a realistic assessment using a combined approach as in this work may impose a noteworthy contribution to grid management.…”

Ten questions concerning energy flexibility in buildings

“…Nik and Moazami [81] investigated how the implementation of collective intelligence, that controls groups of buildings in Stockholm, is effective to decrease energy demand up to 44% and absorb the shock during extreme weather events compared with the case without intelligence. Mar et al investigated management strategies to maintain user's needs in an energy community with PV generation and houses with non-controllable and controllable devices while maintaining the community network operation during temporary reduction of available grid power [82].…”

Assessment of energy sharing coefficients under the new Portuguese renewable energy communities regulation

“…The collective association of consumers and/or prosumers to conduct collective self-consumption, instead of individual self-consumption, is assessed in a variety of ways in the literature. These associations are implemented and studied to achieve different objectives, such as energy savings and reduction of GHG emissions [ 9 ], higher PV self-consumption ratios [ 10 ], or improvement of wellbeing on a grid fault via energy flexibility [ 11 ]. For low-voltage grids, the deployment of energy communities can also offer real-time scheduling of flexibility [ 12 ].…”