Centralised and Distributed Optimization for Aggregated Flexibility Services Provision

The recent deployment of distributed battery units in prosumer premises offer new opportunities for providing aggregated flexibility services to both distribution system operators and balance responsible parties. The optimization problem presented in this paper is formulated with an objective of cost minimization which includes energy and battery degradation cost to provide flexibility services. A decomposed solution approach with the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is used instead of commonly adopted centralised optimization to reduce the computational burden and time, and then reduce scalability limitations. In this work we apply a modified version of ADMM that includes two new features with respect to the original algorithm: first, the primal variables are updated concurrently, which reduces significantly the computational cost when we have a large number of involved prosumers; second, it includes a regularization term named Proximal Jacobian (PJ) that ensures the stability of the solution. A case study is presented for optimal battery operation of 100 prosumer sites with real-life data. The proposed method finds a solution which is equivalent to the centralised optimization problem and is computed between 5 and 12 times faster. Thus, aggregators or large-scale energy communities can use this scalable algorithm to provide flexibility services.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Renewable Energy Communities: The Challenge for New Policy and Regulatory Frameworks Design

The diffusion of distributed renewable energy production plants causes balancing issues of energy demand and supply to the national electric grid. To guarantee an efficient management of power networks, new flexibility measures (e.g., storage systems, Demand-Side Management) are necessary. In this context, consumers switch from passive to active agents, and become aware of their role in the electricity market due to their production and storage capabilities. The possibility to empower prosumers in a market environment generates new opportunities and challenges the operation of power systems. Recently, a proposal for a new design of energy systems has emerged, namely peer-to-peer (P2P) energy communities, in which prosumers can share locally and directly both electricity production and investments. Based on a consumer-centric and bottom-up approach, pure consumers, prosumers, local Authorities and energy utilities can collaborate in order to obtain economic, environmental and social benefits. Starting from a preliminary literature review, this paper provides an overview of the most common P2P community structures and investigates their potential techno-economic benefits, and related policy and regulatory implications. By properly addressing these latter issues and involving stakeholders and private actors\u2019 participation, Governments and local Authorities can favor large diffusion of energy communities.Prosumer