Grid Capacity Management for peer-to-peer Local Energy Communities

This paper aims to present a methodology, which can be used by local energy communities to enable a peer-topeer energy market. With the increase in distributed energy resources such as photovoltaic systems, micro-wind and a new generation of loads such as electric vehicle and battery storage, it is essential to optimally manage them. Flexibility derived from these devices can be leveraged in an energy market. Currently, the biggest shortcoming of a local energy market is the lack of settlement process to validate the feasibility of market bids. This is to ensure that the bids do not lead to grid violations, ensuring adequate grid security, operational safety, and continuity of supply. The methodology introduced in this paper reconciles the grid and market settlement issue by generating dynamic active, reactive power consumption and in-feed limits at a certain number of controllable buses where flexibilities are located. This incorporates the use of the Newton-Raphson load flow combined with a heuristic optimization solver which is applied to a real low voltage distribution grid which is located in Steiermark, Austria. State and uncontrollable variables for optimization are fed into the blockchain at every sample and are available at all buses. The results obtained from the study shows that the method can successfully eliminate voltage violations for various use-cases.