Dealing with contradictory objectives in energy communities: A game-oriented trilevel approach

Energy communities empower end users to partake actively in the operation of the system while lowering energy procurement through optimal sharing resources. The main objective of energy communities is reducing the collective bill by maximizing the usage of local assets such as photovoltaic and storage systems. However, the different community members may raise particular objectives that may eventually lie in contradiction with the reduction of the electricity cost. For example, prosumers may be interested in incrementing their consumption above a benchmark point in order to increase their comfort and satisfaction. Such contradictory objectives should be considered in energy management of communities in order to ensure its social stability and successful. To this end, a novel game-based trilevel day-ahead approach for cooperative communities is developed, in which two secondary objectives can be accommodated together with the cost minimization original target. As a sake of example, the developed tool tailors in this paper to the case in which prosumers aim at maximizing their consumption while storage pretend to minimize the degradation of assets. The original trilevel structure is reduced to a solvable single-level problem that provide an equilibrium point in the Nash sense. A number of results is provided in 5 and 15-bus cases in order to validate the new approach. Results show that the new proposal can be easily implemented in a variety of scenarios, showing a case-independent performance. The hierarchical decision-logic procedure has been illustrated and validated analysing the total community cost under different users’ preferences. Finally, it is shown that the developed methodology scales well with the storage capability and community size.