Distributed Approach for Energy Sharing in Local Energy Community based on ADMM Algorithm

Energy communities refer to a group of producers, consumers and prosumers who collaborate with each other in managing their energy to reduce their dependency on the up-stream power grid by sharing energy locally among the participants in the energy community. Additionally, participating in the energy community empower consumers and prosumers to reduce/increase their energy costs/profits. Sharing energy in local energy communities is an approach which enables consumers to utilize the benefits of distributed energy resources, e.g. PV panels, in case they are not able to own their individual distributed energy resources due to the lack of different factors such as sufficient space. However, security of the information is one the concerns of players in the energy community who are not willing to share their private information with others. Thus, in this paper, we propose a distributed approach for energy sharing in the local energy communities based on alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) to enable players to solve their own optimization problem individually without sharing their private information with other players of the community. At the end, the performance of our proposed model is evaluated in a small energy community consisting of five consumers and a PV park as a shared energy resource in which each consumer solves its own individual optimization problem and declares its own solar energy demand to the community manager, and the community manager responds to the signals received from the consumers based on the production of the shared solar system. According to our study, it is found that the energy cost and the dependency of the studied energy community have decreased on the upstream network.