Price-aware Renewable Energy Management with Transmission Losses

In this paper we propose a genie-aided strategy to optimize the use of renewable energy (RE) in a community of households with shared access to storage and RE generation facilities. The households are spread over a limited geographical area, and are subject to different time-varying power consumption profiles, and energy prices. We consider a finite number of RE generators and energy storage devices (ESDs), which are deployed in specific locations. The proposed strategy seeks to minimize the energy cost incurred by the participating households by optimizing the rate at which RE is consumed over time. Our model takes into account the power loss incurred in the transmission of energy from the generators to the loads. The optimization problem is cast as a non-convex quadratically constrained quadratic program, which is simplified in order to derive an approximate solution. Numerical results show that transmission losses and differences across price and load can significantly affect the optimal RE allocation among the households. The proposed strategy offers valuable insights for energy planning purposes and can be used to devise real-time RE management algorithms by incorporating the necessary forecasting techniques.