Energy modeling of aggregated community scale residential microgrids

Abstract

Many residential homeowners are investing in distributed energy generation, energy storage, and load management technologies. Due to the highly variable nature of residential energy consumption, homeowners tend to oversize their generation and storage capabilities in order to meet their demand. We find the energy needs of many households are more efficiently met when neighboring homeowners pool their energy resources into an aggregate microgrid instead of relying solely on individually owned resources. We quantify the energy needs of individual residences and the aggregate microgrid by measuring net load variability. Using modified coincident factors, a conventional measure of variability in the electric utility industry, we calculate that the overall load variability for four southern Wisconsin households is reduced due to net load aggregation.