Impact of Internal Energy Exchange Cost on Integrated Community Energy Systems

Integration of more distributed renewable energy resources (RES) technologies in the past few years has led to reliability and stability issues in the energy systems due to the mismatch between the demand and the intermittent RES production. Integrated community energy systems (ICES) have been discussed as part of the solution for these challenges. In this paper, we have assessed the impact of the internal energy exchange (IEE) fee in ICESs with a model-based approach. The impact is considered for the performance of ICESs and the behaviour of different prosumers' assets such as batteries, thermal energy storage, auxiliary heat pumps and demand response. A case study has been carried out on a district in Gothenburg, Sweden and the results show that the ICESs' performance and the assets' behaviour are highly affected by IEE fee and the ICES chooses different cost saving strategies at different IEE fees. For the case study, the community's cost was reduced by 30%, and the electricity import and export by 45.6% and 97.2% respectively when low IEE fee were considered.