On Optimal Management of Energy Storage Systems in Renewable Energy Communities

Renewable energy communities are legal entities involving the association of citizens, organizations and local businesses aimed at contributing to the green energy transition and providing social, environmental and economic benefits to their members. This goal is pursued through the cooperative efforts of the community actors and by increasing the local energy self-consumption. In this paper, the optimal energy community operation in the presence of energy storage units is addressed. By exploiting the flexibility provided by the storage facilities, the main task is to minimize the community energy bill by taking advantage of incentives related to local self-consumption. Optimality conditions are derived, and an explicit optimal solution is devised. Numerical simulations are provided to assess the performance of the proposed solution.