Terrier, C.; Loustau, J.R.H.; Lepour, D.; Maréchal, F. From Local Energy Communities towards National Energy System: A Grid-Aware Techno-Economic Analysis. Energies2024, 17, 910.
Terrier, C.; Loustau, J.R.H.; Lepour, D.; Maréchal, F. From Local Energy Communities towards National Energy System: A Grid-Aware Techno-Economic Analysis. Energies 2024, 17, 910.
Terrier, C.; Loustau, J.R.H.; Lepour, D.; Maréchal, F. From Local Energy Communities towards National Energy System: A Grid-Aware Techno-Economic Analysis. Energies2024, 17, 910.
Terrier, C.; Loustau, J.R.H.; Lepour, D.; Maréchal, F. From Local Energy Communities towards National Energy System: A Grid-Aware Techno-Economic Analysis. Energies 2024, 17, 910.
Abstract
Energy communities are key actors in the energy transition since they optimally interconnect renewable energy capacities with the consumers. Despite versatile objectives, they usually aim at improving the self-consumption of renewable electricity within low voltage grids to maximize revenues. In addition, energy communities are an excellent opportunity to supply renewable electricity to regional and national energy systems. However, effective price signals have to be designed to coordinate the needs of the energy infrastructure with the interests of these local stakeholders. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the integration of energy communities at the national level with a bottom-up approach. District energy systems with a building scale resolution are modelled in a mixed integer linear programming problem. The Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition is applied to reduce the computational time. The methodology lies within the framework of renewable energy hub, characterized by a high share of photovoltaic capacities. Both investments into equipment and its operation are considered. The model is applied on a set of five typical districts and weather locations representative of the Swiss building stock. The extrapolation to the national scale revealed a heterogeneous photovoltaic potential throughout the country. Present electricity tariffs promote a maximal investment into photovoltaic panels in every region, reaching an installed capacity of 67.2 GW and generating 80 TWh per year. Since the national PV capacity needed is forecast at 15.4 GW peak, coordinated investments between local and national actors are needed to prevent dispensable expenses. An uncoordinated design is expected to increase the total costs for residential energy systems by 43.2% and curtails 48.2% of local renewable electricity.
Keywords
energy communities; renewable energy hub; national system integration; MILP; multi-objective optimization; decomposition
Subject
Engineering, Energy and Fuel Technology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
