Modeling households’ behavior, energy system operation, and interaction in the energy community

Technological advancements and behavior shifts are reshaping households’ energy consumption patterns, necessitating advanced models to quantify their behavior, energy system operation, and interactions in the energy communities. While various models address these aspects individually, there is a lack of a unified framework that covers them holistically. This paper presents FLEX, a modeling framework consisting three interconnected components that are designed to feed the output of one into the next. First is FLEX-Behavior, which simulates hourly household energy demands using a Markov core. Second is FLEX-Operation, which models hourly operation of household energy systems across three modes: simulation, perfect-forecasting optimization, and rolling-horizon optimization. Its results are validated with detailed physics-based building simulation software. Third is FLEX-Community, which models the peer-to-peer electricity trading among community members and battery operation of the aggregator. Finally, demonstration results are provided to show the capabilities of FLEX in potential applications for supporting policy design. In summary, FLEX advances existing approaches by bridging detailed household-level behavior and energy system modeling with community-scale optimization, addressing the trade-off between computational tractability and household-level accuracy in the modeling of aggregator-operated energy communities. However, limitations also lie in the requirement of high-quality micro-level data for robust estimation and validation. Future research could investigate system-level dynamics between energy communities and power systems, including participation in ancillary services markets and the evolving regulatory frameworks governing community operations.