Electrical Energy Savings through Efficient Cooperation of Urban Buildings: The Smart Community Case of Superblocks' in Barcelona

The major challenges that urban living has presented in recent years, as a result of the increasing population density, have triggered a discussion about the development of effective solutions that target the economic, social and environmental sustainability of urban areas. Environmental concerns have stressed the need for the development of innovative solutions for the effective and flexible utilization of renewable energy. In this article, we study the benefits of cooperation as an alternative solution to the optimum management of the energy generated, stored and consumed in urban buildings. The proposed cooperative energy management scheme is applied to a group of smart buildings of diverse energy consumption patterns that form a cluster and exchange energy, so that an optimum utilization of the energy generated by local renewables is achieved. We also demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the cooperative energy management system on a representative Superblock of Barcelona, since the idea of building cooperation is inspired by Barcelona's unique smart community planning model. The results indicate the significant reduction of power management cost (32.52 percent on average) and carbon emissions (62.88 percent on average) compared to the no power-exchange case, due to the optimal utilization of energy from renewable sources.