Building Flexibility Bidding Curves for Energy Communities

The integration of renewable generation requires new sources of flexibility, including the flexibility from distributed resources that can be unlocked via local flexibility markets (LFMs). In these markets, aggregators (AGGs) offer the flexibility from their portfolios to the flexibility requesting parties (FRP), i.e. system operators or other balancing requesting parties. To bid in LFMs and manage market uncertainty, AGGs must compute the flexibility they are willing to offer at each possible flexibility market price, by optimizing their portfolios. This paper proposes a 2-stage methodology to compute the flexibility bidding curve that an energy community can send to a LFM when behaving as an AGG of its members resources. At stage 1, the energy community (EC) manager computes the optimal EC operation without flexibility provision, minimizing the EC energy bill, and serving as the baseline to verify the flexibility provision. Then, at stage 2, for each possible flexibility price, the EC manager computes the optimal flexibility to be offered, minimizing the EC energy bill but including the flexibility provision incomes, to build the flexibility bidding curve.