Shared community energy storage allocation and optimization

Abstract

Distributed Energy Resources have been playing an increasingly important role in smart grids. Distributed Energy Resources consist primarily of energy generation and storage systems utilized by individual households or shared among them as a community. In contrast to individual energy storage, the field of community energy storage is now gaining more attention in various countries. However, existing models are either tailored towards optimizing the operations of individual energy storage or do not consider the notion of sharing energy storage within a community. This paper proposes a framework to allocate shared energy storage within a community and to then optimize the operational cost of electricity using a mixed integer linear programming formulation. The allocation options of energy storage include private energy storage and three options of community energy storage: random, diverse, and homogeneous allocation. With various load options of appliances, photovoltaic generation and energy storage set-ups, the operational cost of electricity for the households is minimized to provide the optimal operation scheduling. Computational results are presented on two real use cases in the cities of Ennis, Ireland and Waterloo, Canada, to show the advantage of using community energy storage as opposed to private energy storage and to evaluate the cost savings which can facilitate future deployment of community energy storage. In addition to the electricity operational cost, energy storage utilization and operation fairness are used to compare different allocation options of storage systems.