Towards Reducing Electricity Costs in an Energy Community Equipped with Home Energy Management Systems and a Local Energy Controller

An energy community equipped with Home Energy Management Systems (HEMSs) is considered in this paper. A local energy controller in the energy community makes it possible to transact energy between houses to support the different consumption patterns of each end-user. Price-based voluntary Demand Response (DR) programs are applied to each house to motivate end-users to alter their consumption patterns, allowing the necessary flexibility of the electrical grid. Also, the existence of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) micro-generation and an Energy Storage System (ESS) are taken into account. The results demonstrate that the proposed model based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is fully capable of reducing daily electricity costs while considering end-users' comfort and respecting the different technical constraints.