Toward an Effective Community Energy Management by Using a Cluster Storage

Abstract

The integration of renewable local energy generation in single households - turning the household into a 'prosumer' - is an important way to support an ecological transition of the electric power system. However, due to the volatile and distributed nature of most renewable energy sources, the power system may face stability problems when integrating a large number of renewables. The paper at hand describes an approach to overcome these shortages in a two-fold manner: First, the effects of the installed renewables shall be limited locally to a group of households - a so-called 'energy community'. To do so, all the participating households are using existing self-consumption optimization tools. However, when a household has excess energy which can not be consumed locally, this energy is shared among the other participating households by using a cluster storage device, thus enabling a community self-consumption before feeding into the low-voltage distribution grid. Second, the connected operator may request flexibility from the participating households. For that, additional loads or load sheds are triggered by the requesting grid operator, depending on the current situation in the grid. The households decide autonomously about the amount of granted flexibility, receiving respective financial incentives. This work introduces an energy management concept and a prototypical control infrastructure used for the aforementioned functionalities. In a number of simulations and field tests, the proposed approach was successfully evaluated. The article provides a comprehensive overview of the gained results and the conclusions derived from them.