Community Energy Sharing in a Microgrid Architecture with Energy Storage and Renewable Energy Support

Abstract

The increase in the number of installed renewable energy in a residential network needs an efficient energy management system (EMS) to store or sell the surplus energy back to the grid during the surplus generation. Selling of power back to the grid can affect the reliability of the traditional grid system, to avoid this energy sharing is proposed to share the surplus energy with close neighbours to avoid the transmission loss and increase the utilization rate of renewable energy. In this paper, we use the cyber-physical system (CPS) to coordinate the neighbours and to collect data from all the homes using the smart meters. The system’s objective is to reduce the grid cost and to benefit each home which shares the energy. This system reduces the need for a huge energy storage system (ESS) which is a major capital cost during the installation. We adopt a scheduling algorithm to manage the loads during the shortage of supply and flexibility in scheduling the loads helps to improve energy management without disturbing the user comfort. The whole model is validated with an experimental setup in the university as a part of the MNRE Funded Project.