Development of an Energy Management System for a Renewable Energy Community and Performance Analysis via Global Sensitivity Analysis

This paper presents the development of an energy management system (EMS) for a renewable energy community (REC) with the load-generation balancing objective. In this regard, rule-based and optimization mechanisms are proposed for the REC management in line with the scope of a field trial and considering the scarcity of the measurement and historical data. This typical data scarcity along with the intermittent behaviour of renewable energy resources introduce an unavoidable level of uncertainty— not being adequately addressed in the EMS literature— that might ultimately affect the proper REC management. Hence, a comprehensive performance analysis of the proposed EMS has been conducted via global sensitivity analysis (GSA). Particularly, variance-based sensitivity analysis has been employed to investigate how the variability of a set of selected indicators of the REC performance is apportioned to the different sources of uncertainty specifically related to the forecast and flexibility availability. Results show that the EMS performance is consistent with the EMS objective. The application of GSA reveals though interesting findings that contradict antecedent misconceptions about how different uncertainty sources affect the EMS performance. Although being related to the specific REC under study, the present work specializes GSA method in novel ways that pave the path for its reusability in the context of other EMS applications with different boundary conditions. By highlighting the necessity of GSA and showcasing its suitability to study the EMS performance under an uncertainty framework, the present work offers a precious tool to support system operators in their decision making process.