Integrated Planning of a Solar/Storage Collective

French regulation allows consumers in low-voltage networks to form collectives to produce, share, and consume local energy under the collective self-consumption framework. A natural consequence of collectively-owned generation projects is the need to allocate production among consumers. In long-term plans, production allocation determines each of the consumers' benefits of joining the collective. In the short-term, energy should be dynamically allocated to reflect operation. This article presents a framework that integrates long and short-term planning of a collective that shares a solar plus energy storage system. In the long-term planning stage, we maximize the collective's welfare and equitably allocate expected energy to each consumer. For operation, we propose a model predictive control algorithm that minimizes short-term costs and allocates energy to each consumer on a 30-minute basis (as required by French regulation). We adjust the energy allotment ex-post operation to reflect the materialization of uncertainty. We present a case study where we showcase the framework for a 15 consumer collective.

I. Introduction

As part of an almost universal embrace of renewable energies by people and governments around the globe, many jurisdictions today recognize and encourage the self-consumption of local renewable energy generation. For example, the European Commission put out a set of best practices for self-consumption regulation [1] and several European countries including Germany, France, Spain, and Switzerland have in place laws and frameworks related to self-consumption [2].