Valuing the Electricity Produced Locally in Renewable Energy Communities through Noncooperative Resources Scheduling Games

Abstract: We propose two market designs for the optimal day-ahead scheduling of energy exchanges within renewable energy communities. The first one implements a cooperative demand side management scheme inside a community where members objectives are coupled through grid tariffs, whereas the second allows in addition the valuation of excess generation in the community and on the retail market. Both designs are formulated as centralized optimization problems first, and as non cooperative games then. In the latter case, the existence and efficiency of the corresponding (Generalized) Nash Equilibria are rigorously studied and proven, and distributed implementations of iterative solution algorithms for finding these equilibria are proposed, with proofs of convergence. The models are tested on a use-case made by 55 members with PV generation, storage and flexible appliances, and compared with a benchmark situation where members act individually (situation without community). We compute the global REC costs and individual bills, inefficiencies of the decentralized models compared to the centralized optima, as well as technical indices such as self-consumption ratio, self-sufficiency ratio, and peak-to-average ratio.