Exploiting Renewable Energy and Flexibility Potential via Local Cooperation

In decentralized energy systems, end users can participate in energy generation and flexibility provision via local cooperation. This work investigates the cooperation between a commercial peer and residential peers using an energy system optimization model. Peers have surplus electricity from renewable sources or flexibility through flexible generation, battery storage, or demand side management. Results show that cooperation can reduce total costs by 4 - 11%, electricity imports by 12 - 22%, and total emissions by 1 - 4%. The variation is due to different assumptions regarding the transaction fees on local trading and the available flexibility options. The operation of energy technologies changes when local trading is allowed. For example, the commercial peer reduces its electricity and heat generation and switches the operation of its cooling technologies to use the surplus from the residential peers. Individual contributions, i.e. Shapley values, are analysed and applied to distribute the financial benefits from the cooperation. The diversity and scale of demand, generation, and flexibility can alter the benefit distribution. Lastly, the cooperation between residential areas performs poorly. Therefore, the heterogeneous composition of peers plays a significant role in the local cooperation.