A Two-Stage Approach for Efficient Power Sharing within Energy Districts

The recent advances regarding the decentralization of renewable energy production, the new technologies involved in the management of smart grids, and the opening of national energy markets, enriched with the use of demand-response strategies, have led to a notable diffusion of local energy markets. A local energy market is defined as an aggregation of energy producers, consumers, and prosumers that are located in a restricted area and see an interest in joining together to form a so-called 'energy district.' In this paper, we present a two-stage approach that enables sharing renewable energy within a district and minimizes the costs and/or maximizes the revenues deriving from the provision and the sale of energy, both for single prosumers and for the district as a whole. The main novelty with respect to the state-of-the-art is the introduction in the optimization process of a second stage that, starting from the energy exchanges determined in the first stage, redistributes to the prosumers the surplus energy, i.e., the energy produced locally that exceeds the demand of the prosumers. The two-stage approach benefits have been assessed in a real-life testbed deployed on an Italian university campus.