Scheduling of Resources in Renewable Energy Communities

Abstract

This work presents a detailed study of the scheduling of power and energy resources in renewable energy communities (RECs). The study has been developed starting from the analysis of a single basic unit of the community, i.e., the prosumer and its microgrid, to the scheduling and expansion of the energy community concept with several prosumers through several scenarios. The individual scheduling problem of the prosumer has been studied as a day-ahead deterministic problem and as a multistage stochastic problem to consider uncertainties associated with energy generation and energy consumption. Furthermore, an approach has been formulated to consider the integration of bidirectional charging services of electrical vehicles within a local energy system with the presence of renewable generation. Moreover, this thesis focuses on the scenario in which direct energy transactions between prosumers located within a REC are allowed in addition to the energy transactions with the external energy provider. The day-ahead scheduling problem has been addressed by a centralized approach and by a distributed approach based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The developed approaches provide the scheduling of the available energy resources to limit the balancing action of the external grid and allocate the internal network losses to the corresponding energy transactions. Finally, the thesis presents a coordinated day-ahead and intra-day approach to provide the optimal scheduling of the resources in a REC. In this case, the ADMM-based procedure, which is aimed at minimizing the total energy procurement costs, is adapted to cope with the impact of the fluctuation of both the local energy generation and demand during the day. To achieve this, a day-ahead multistage stochastic optimization approach is combined with an intra-day decision-making procedure, able to adjust the scheduling of the energy resources according to the current operational conditions.