Impact of Communication Reliability on Achieving Energy Sharing in Smart Cities

With the development of internet of things (IoT) technology, massive distributed energy resources (DERs) can be aggregated to improve the economy and reliability of power grids by sharing the surplus energy among a community. Energy sharing in smart cities requires the support of advanced information and communication technology (ICT) to ensure communication reliability. However, existing literature has ignored the impact of communication reliability (CR) on energy sharing. Therefore, an energy sharing model is proposed considering CR in smart cities, which aims to investigate the impacts of CR on achieving energy sharing benefits. A multi-microgrid connected by a distribution network is conceived in this paper. Each microgrid (MG) includes photovoltaic, energy storage, controllable load, and a communication base station (BS). The BS is responsible for the communication interaction between the local MG and the distribution system operator (DSO). Due to the interference and noise among the MGs, CR is modeled as a function of transmit power of different BSs. The proposed energy sharing scheme is to achieve DER sharing under the premise that each MG meets its physical and CR constraints. Case studies based on the IEEE 33-bus feeder system validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and method. Traditional energy sharing without considering CR may lead to the violation of CR requirements. Additionally, BSs can be used as a kind of controllable load in the distribution network to reduce operation costs.