Real-time optimal scheduling for prosumers resilient to regulatory changes

The last decade marked an exponential increase in photovoltaic (PV) systems installed on the rooftop of domestic residences within Europe. This situation was basically favored by generous financial schemes such as Feed-in-Tariff and the market of green certificates. However, such governmental incentives drastically reduced, or they were already replaced with net-metering schemes which favor different scenarios: increase of self-consumption and decrease of grid-back injections. This unstable regulatory environment puts both new and old owners of PV systems under a regulatory financial risk. Recently, a regulatory resilient architecture, called UniRCon, was proposed, to overcome both financial and technical regulation uncertainties, where local battery energy storage system plays a key role. Besides the architecture we propose a real-time energy management system (EMS) that could be used for the daily operation of such systems. The real-time EMS is needed to prove the feasibility of this solution in short and long run and it could be also used as the main subroutine in the financial risk analysis. The EMS is based on a mixed-integer linear programming energy management tool that considers possible arbitrage benefits due to price difference in the energy purchased from the grid, while explicitly considering the efficiency of the power electronic interfaces (converters) according to the operation point. We prove our approach using a lab-scale experimental setup of a DC residential microgrid. The results are analyzed under realistic operation scenarios derived from one-year load and PV power output measurements.