Hierarchical Energy Sharing Management for a Renewable Energy Community with Heterogeneous End-users

This paper presents a novel management mechanism for enabling preference-based energy sharing among heterogeneous end-users within a centralized renewable energy community. The proposed hierarchical mechanism involves each end-user performing a day-ahead self-scheduling based on the internal electricity prices, after which the community manager optimizes intra-market exchanges in parallel and accomplishes preference-based internal energy sharing to finalize the electricity billing of the end-users. Furthermore, by defining value as an intrinsic motivational factor, four types of end-users are introduced in the energy community. The proposed energy community supplies a mix of different energy classes depending on the end-users’ prioritized values. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in reducing energy costs and improving energy sharing among end-users.