Summary:
Driven by environmental and economic motives, different distributed energy resources (DERs) are being installed at a fast pace. The high penetration levels of DERs could result in technical issues at low voltage distribution networks (LVDNs). Therefore, many approaches were proposed in the literature to manage DERs to maximize their economic benefits while respecting the LVDNs' limits. One of the new approaches for managing DERs is community energy trading (CET). CET allows end users to exchange energy with each other besides energy exchange with retailers. Recent studies showed that CET could result in violations of the LVDNs limits if the grid constraints are not considered in the optimization model. These violations mainly happen due to the synchronized charging of electric vehicles and battery energy storage (i.e., flexible devices) connected to the LVDNs, which could require an infrastructure upgrade at LVDN. This study proposes including contracted power cost in the CET objective function besides the energy cost to mitigate the impacts on LVDN. The proposed approach does not require the consideration of grid constraints in the CET model or interaction with the distribution system operator. The results showed that the proposed approach reduced the peak demand of the energy community (EC) by 34.3% without affecting its economic performance. Moreover, the proposed approach prevents violations of LVDN limits in line loading, voltage unbalance, and voltage magnitude that occur in the CET scenario that does not consider contracted power cost.
Spanish layman's summary:
Este artículo evalúa los efectos de considerar el coste de la potencia contratada en la operación de las comunidades energéticas (CE) además del coste de la energía para mitigar los impactos sobre el redes de distribución (RD). Los resultados muestran que el enfoque propuesto reduce la demanda punta de la CE y los impactos sobre las RD.
English layman's summary:
This study evaluates the effect of contracted power cost for energy communities (EC) besides the energy cost to mitigate the impacts on distribution network (DN). The results showed that the proposed approach reduced the peak demand of the EC and impacts on DN.
Keywords: Local electricity market; peer-to-peer energy trading; energy community; transactive energy.
Registration date: 02/11/2023
IIT-23-418WP
