Provision of the Energy Community Flexibility Services While Ensuring Optimal Social Welfare

As global awareness of environmental preservation grows, more previously passive consumers are integrating renewable energy sources (RES), thus becoming prosumers. To overcome the problems faced by prosumers, consumers, and prosumers can be grouped into energy communities (ECs). This paper proposes an enhanced two-stage stochastic optimization model based on mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) to address the challenges of achieving optimal electricity management of the EC that provides flexibility services while ensuring the maximization of the community's social welfare. Also, the proposed model supports peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity trading, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) service, and flexibility services to third parties, e.g. balance responsible party (BRP), distribution system operator (DSO) or aggregator (AGG). An analysis of the obtained results shows the benefits that a high level of flexibility in the operation of the EC can be ensured with a small number of EVs within the EC.