Procurement Cost Minimization of an Energy Community with Biogas, Photovoltaic and Storage Units

The paper presents a day-ahead scheduling procedure of a local energy community (LEC) that includes one or more producers equipped with a biogas power plant. The other participants may own photovoltaic units, battery energy systems (BESs), and loads. The aim of the scheduling, which essentially concerns biogas units and BESs, is the minimization of the daily energy procurement cost of the LEC, including the fuel cost. The scheduling procedure also provides the prices of the internal transactions. In particular, the paper shows the impact of the biogas power production and analyzes how it affects the prices of the transactions between the LEC participants. Several case studies are presented, characterized by different scenarios of LEC self-consumption, number of dispatchable units, and fuel consumption. Both a centralized and a distributed optimization model, based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), have been implemented and compared.