An Optimal Control Approach for Enhancing Efficiency in Renewable Energy Communities

Abstract

Energy storage systems are key to take advantage of the potential of renewable energy. Renewable energy communities endowed with a Shared Battery Energy Storage System (SBESS) have been proposed as a key factor to efficiently exploit distributed renewable generation. However, ensuring renewable energy communities are not only environmentally friendly but also cost-effective requires that their SBESS be optimally managed. In this letter we cast the problem of optimally managing a SBESS in an energy community as the problem of minimizing the sum of the daily energy bills of the community. Then, under mild assumptions, we rigorously show that solving this optimal control problem over an horizon of N days is equivalent to sequentially solving N optimization problems over a single day. Our theoretical results are compounded by numerical simulations on a real dataset of Australian households’ demand and generation.