Volume 44: Energy Transitions toward Carbon Neutrality: Part VII

A Robust Strategy for Energy Management in Local Energy Communities Meysam Khojasteh, Pedro Faria, Zita Vale

Abstract

Local energy communities enhance energy self- sufficiency and sustainability by promoting local renewable generation and consumption. However, variations in renewable power generation and consumption are inevitable. Using flexible resources is crucial for ensuring uninterrupted energy supply during interruptions, enhancing local sustainability, and improving emergency response. This paper presents a linear model for scheduling the resources of local energy communities in the presence of energy storage and hydrogen systems. To evaluate the impacts of uncertain demand and renewable power generation, robust optimization is used. The model is formulated as a max- min problem, where the inner sub-problems represent the optimal community operations. Furthermore, the worst-case scenarios of uncertain demand and renewable generation are addressed through outer maximization. The strong duality theorem is employed to solve the max-min problem. Moreover, the big-M method is used to develop a mixed integer linear-based model. Finally, the performance of the proposed model is evaluated by a case study and two scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate that the integration of the hydrogen system improves the flexibility of the community and the total energy supply cost. For example, the cost reduction when the uncertainty budget equals zero is 37.99%.

Keywords Energy storage, hydrogen system, local energy community, robust optimization, uncertainty