Planning Energy Communities with Flexibility Provision and Energy and Cross-Sector Flexible Assets

Planning Energy communities (ECs) requires engaging members, designing business models and governance rules, and sizing distributed energy resources (DERs) for a cost-effective investment. Meanwhile, the growing share of non-dispatchable renewable generation demands more flexible energy systems. Local flexibility markets (LFMs) are emerging as effective mechanisms to procure this flexibility, granting ECs a new revenue stream. Since sizing with flexibility becomes a highly complex problem, we propose a 2 -stage methodology for estimating DERs size in an EC with collective self-consumption, flexibility provision and cross-sector (CS) assets such as thermal loads and electric vehicles (EVs). The first stage computes the optimal DER capacities to be installed for each member without flexibility provision. The second stage departs from the first stage capacities to assess how to modify the initial capacities to profit from providing flexibility. The impact of data clustering and flexibility provision are assessed through a case study.