Smart Energy Communities Power Capacity Firming and Grid Flexibility Services

Most renewable energy sources, while contributing to the goals of the European Union’s Green Deal to decrease the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, also create stability and control problems to power grids due to their variability. In order to handle this, the power grid relies on flexibility services, which can be performed by changing injection and/or consumption patterns. While consumption patterns can be modified using loads, to allow a smart grid to operate there is also a need of power firming and balancing services provided by energy producers. Present day developments in storage technologies and their cost decrease redefine storage systems as one of the most important ways to ensure a stable and secure, mostly renewable based, power system. A popular application of renewable energy is based on photovoltaic (PV) panels. Without controllable loads and battery energy storage systems (BESS), small communities comprised of buildings with PV generation will themselves become a source of variability. This paper is focused on converting smart energy residential and commercial communities from variability "troublemakers" into actual providers of power firming and flexibility services. Combining PV energy production with storage and controllable loads in smart energy communities and grouping together either physically close or virtually related buildings using an aggregation platform will enable this conversion process. In order to do this, issues like optimizing the operation of the PV system plus BESS and sizing of the storage depending on the services to be supplied by the smart energy communities have to be first addressed. This paper will propose a methodology to determine the optimal operation and sizing of a PV system plus BESS and will present the architecture of an aggregation platform used for grouping together buildings into smart energy communities in order to provide energy services, by extending the functionality of the SHEEDAP platform presented in previous papers. The improved platform, named SCHEEDAP (Smart Control Hub Electric Energy Data Aggregation Platform) will also include a EMS functionality, distributing active power reference set-points to each buildings local controller (smart inverter) based on close to real-time optimization results.