Abstract
In decentralized energy systems, electricity generated and flexibility offered by households can be organized in the form of community energy systems. Business models, which enable this aggregation at the community level, will impact on the involved actors and the electricity market. For the case of Germany, in this paper different aggregation scenarios are analyzed from the perspective of actors and the market. The main components in these scenarios are the Community Energy Storage (CES) technology, the electricity tariff structure, and the aggregation goal. For this evaluation, a bottom-up community energy system model is presented, in which the households and retailer are the key actors. In our model, we distinguish between the households with inflexible electricity load and the flexible households that own a heat pump or Photovoltaic (PV) storage systems. By using a game-theoretic approach and modeling the interaction between the retailer and households as a Stackelberg game, a community real-time pricing structure is derived. To find the solution of the modeled Stackelberg game, a genetic algorithm is implemented. To analyze the impact of the aggregation scenarios on the electricity market, a “Market Alignment Indicator” is proposed. The results show that under the considered regulatory framework, the deployment of a CES can increase the retailer’s operational profits while improving the alignment of the community energy system with the signals from the electricity market. Depending on the aggregation goal of the retailer, the implementation of community real-time pricing could lead to a similar impact. Moreover, such a tariff structure can lead to financial benefits for flexible households.
Highlights
The levelized cost of electricity from Photovoltaic (PV) systems has fallen below the electricity retail price in many countries worldwide, a development that has incentivized the investment in PV systems for many households [1,2]
Our main contributions are: We propose a bottom-up model to investigate the aggregation of households in a community energy system
It can be seen that both Community Real-Time Pricing (C-Real-Time Pricing (RTP)) tariffs show a similar price range, limited by the searching space limitations of the genetic algorithm
Summary
The levelized cost of electricity from Photovoltaic (PV) systems has fallen below the electricity retail price in many countries worldwide, a development that has incentivized the investment in PV systems for many households [1,2]. Similar to PV systems, battery storage has experienced a significant reduction in system prices. Several studies indicate that this trend will continue in the few years [3,4]. PV storage systems began to become economically viable for households under certain support schemes and generation potentials [5,6]. To PV-storage systems, heat pumps are expected to play an important role in the future energy system. In Germany, for example, about 40 to
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