Shared Community Energy Storage Allocation and Optimization

Abstract

Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) have been playing an increasingly important role for managing households energy costs. DERs consist primarily of energy generation and storage systems utilized by individual households or shared among them as a community. This research proposes a framework to allocate shared energy storage within a community and to then optimize the operational cost of electricity using a mixed integer linear programming (MILP). The allocation options of energy storage include the option of private energy storage (PES) and three options of community energy storage (CES): random, diverse, and homogeneous allocation. With various load options of appliances, photovoltaic (PV) generation and energy storage set-ups, the operational cost of electricity for each household is minimized to provide the optimal operation scheduling.

In addition to the electricity operational cost, energy storage utilization, and operation fairness are used to compare different allocation options of storage systems. Computational results are presented on two real use cases: Waterloo, Canada and Ennis, Ireland. For each case, one typical summer day and one common winter day are selected to simulate different scenarios of the two seasons. Given the allocation options and ownership rates of residential energy storage deployment, this research shows the advantage of using CES as opposed to PES and evaluates the cost savings which can facilitate future deployment of CES.