A Three-Stage Strategy with Settlement for an Energy Community Management under Grid Constraints

This paper focuses on a local energy market where a group of households in a low voltage (LV) grid is organized as an energy community. A three-stage management strategy is proposed under the French collective self-consumption framework. In the first day-ahead stage, households coordinate with the community manager to minimize the overall energy bills for the next day. Then, real-time operation (second stage) focuses on the mitigation of forecast uncertainties and voltage violation, by utilizing the reserve of the local production/storage assets. Finally, the third stage contractually allocates the community energy among the households on 30 min basis (based on the French regulation), in order to ensure fair individual cost reduction and possibly create economic surplus in the community. The proposed community management strategy is evaluated on a LV grid with 55 households, and the results show the proposed strategy achieve an average of 30% individual cost reduction among the users compared to the base scenarios. Furthermore, different pricing scenarios are compared through sensitivity studies and scalability tests are run on larger systems.