Smart Energy Management for Prosumers in Local Energy Communities

The global effort to mitigate climate change has led to significant investments in both large-scale renewable energy and low carbon generation, as well as a significant increase in local, individual and community based smart local energy systems (SLES). SLES have the potential to support fast track decarbonization and support a more democratic and accessible route to energy services. However, there are significant techno-economic challenges to the viability of SLES. With respect to this challenge our paper focuses on the analyzing the role of individual prosumers and consumers in the energy market enabled through SLES. Prosumers can directly trade energy with each other via peer-to-peer (P2P) trading or as a community via peer-to-community (P2C) trading. We examine how SLES can support the optimization of benefits between prosumers and consumers in local communities and the implications this has on the wider electrical network. We design a P2C trading model in MATLAB for a community of 20 agents. Our framework and strategies are then applied across several simulation scenarios for a community of varying ratio of prosumers and consumers. From our findings, we can conclude that P2C trading, implemented with optimal battery management, benefitted the prosumers and consumers financially as well as reducing the congestion and demand on the wider electrical network. The findings from the simulation also suggests that there is an optimal ratio of prosumers to consumers, indicating that a community with prosumer-consumer ratio of 7:13 coupled with a community battery model, deliver optimal returns for the prosumers.