Local Economic Dispatch with Local Renewable Generation and Flexible Load Management

This paper presents a new local economic dispatch composed of local renewable energy sources, flexible and non-flexible residential loads, in combination with a retail market. The developed model is based on a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer programming model, whose objective function minimizes the operational costs of the local energy community. The mathematical formulation is composed of three blocks of constraints such as cost, balance and flexibility constraints. The main decisions are the energy bought from the retail market, the flexible amount of residential load to be increased or decreased in each scheduling period, and the excess of generation from the prosumers to be injected into the network and sold in the retail market. A case study covering a day-ahead time frame with 24 hours of operation and residential end users quantifies the various cost components related to energy consumption, local generation and flexibility.

I. Introduction

The climate change and the Kyoto international agreement helped boost the development of renewable energy sources (RES) such as wind and photovoltaic power [1] . Nowadays, the high penetration of RES is changing electric systems and electricity markets. The current business models of utilities are showing the weaknesses of electricity markets and the drawbacks of the current electric system. However, new business models created by energy service companies play an important role together with ICT platforms for the successful utilization of flexibility on the consumer/prosumer side [2] .