A new smart batteries management for Renewable Energy Communities

Based on the European Directive, the Italian Government has recently published the technical rules for accessing the service for valorizations and incentivizing shared electricity, kick-starting the setting-up of Renewable Energy Communities (RECs). A techno-economic analysis is performed based on a real case in the city of Florence to show the benefits that the creation of a REC can bring to the stakeholders: consumers, prosumers, the national grid operator and third-party companies. Moreover, this study focuses on the role of batteries within a REC by comparing three different battery management systems (BMS). The standard BMS (StBMS) is developed for individual prosumer self-consumption (SC) and not for REC collective-self-consumption (CSC), which is thus penalized by the presence of batteries. For that reason, a new smart BMS (SmBMS) based on REC real-time data monitoring is proposed. This solution guarantees the same level of CSC as in the case without batteries, and compared to the StBMS, it ensures greater REC energy independence from the national grid and leads to more incentives for all stakeholders, causing only a negligible economic loss for prosumers, as their individual SC slightly decreases. The optimal BMS (OpBMS), based on deterministic knowledge of demand and production curves, could guarantee even greater REC energy independence and a better investment for all REC participants, but since it cannot be implemented, it is calculated only to be used as a benchmark to assess other BMSs and to explore the potential of forecasting based methods. StBMS and SmBMS are simulated by Multi​ Energy System Simulator (MESS) while OpBMS by a Mixed-integer linear programming model (MILP).