Bidding in Local Electricity Markets Considering Community Storage Systems

Local energy markets are complex environments with interactions from different actors pursuing diverse objectives. This article introduces a model for bidding in local energy markets considering consumers, small producers, and prosumers with renewable generation. In addition, the model includes a community centralized energy storage system (ESS) that consumers as a community can freely use, paying an incentive to small producers for charging the storage device. Due to its complexity, the problem is solved using metaheuristic optimization. Through an experiment in a case study with nine agents and a 13.2 kWh ESS, we show that the community can benefit from the centralized storage unit, minimizing the consumers' cost and at the same time increasing the profits of the small generators. However, it is also shown that the way in which the community makes use of the central unit and splits the cost and profits is not trivial, and further discussion about the fair share of profits obtained from the battery requires scrutiny of the results.