A smart community energy management scheme considering user dominated demand side response and P2P trading

This paper proposed a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) local community energy pool and a User Dominated Demand Side Response (UDDSR) that can help energy sharing and reduce energy bills of smart community. The proposed UDDSR allows energy users within the community to submit flexible Demand Response (DR) bids to Community Energy Management Scheme (EMS) with flexible start time, stop time and response durations with regarding to users' comfort zones for electric heating systems, electric vehicles and other home appliances, which gives maximum freedom to the DR participants. The scheduling of the DR bids, originally a multi-objective optimization problem (maximize the total flexible demand and the flexible demand in every interval during the whole DR duration), is transferred to a single objective optimization problem (maximize the total demand with penalty for demand imbalance during the whole DR duration) that can significantly decrease the computational complexity. Furthermore, to facilitate efficient energy usage among neighbourhoods, a local energy pool is also proposed to enable the energy trading among users aiming to facilitate the usage of surplus energy within the community. The electricity price of energy pool is determined by the real-time demand/supply ratio, and upper/lower limit for the price is configured to ensure the profitability for all the participants within the pool. To evaluate the performance of proposed UDDSR and local energy pool, comprehensive numerical analysis is conducted. It is found that the energy pool participants without PV can get at least 6.16% savings on electricity bill (when PV penetration level equals to 20%). The energy pool participants with PV can get much better return (at least 13.4% profit increase) on the PV generation compared to the conventional Feed-in-Tariff. If energy users join the UDDSR scheme, the participants can get further return, and the proposed UDDSR can provide a constant load reduction/increase during the every time interval of the whole DR event. If Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) is included in the DR operation, the usage efficiency of customers' flexible loads can achieve more than 85%.