Office Building Energy Community: A Case Study on Optimal Market Operation and Grid Impact

In this paper, we study an office building connected to an urban distribution network from an energy community perspective. The office building and its electrical equipment have a real-world counterpart from which we construct synthetic time series based on the historical measurement data. The office building involves three stakeholders and their assets. The central stakeholders are the owner and the tenant of the building. The third stakeholder is the operator of flexible assets. The smartness of the office building is related to the control capabilities of its assets. These controllable assets are the battery energy storage system (BESS) and the electric vehicles (EV) charging system (EVCS) that both can operate in a flexible manner in response to energy price fluctuations and participate in a reserve market. We proposed different cases where either the owner or the tenant is paying the EV charging, and where the flexibility of the EV charging is either active or not. We show that, when the owner pays for the energy usage of the EVCS and the tenant is using it, there is a beneficial case to form a coalition between them and share the benefits from the flexibility, as otherwise there is no incentive for the tenant to be flexible in the first place. We conducted operative cost-benefit calculations where we shared the community benefits according to the Shapley value and simulated the power flows at the building's connection point based on the market operations. We found that harnessing benefits from the two market operations had significant effects on the power flows at the connection point. This was true when operating under the variable energy prices and in the reserve market.