Analysis of Energy Communities

With the use of smart technologies as a rising trend, the inadequacies in the fields of economy, environment, security, safety, reliability and efficiency in the traditional electricity grid have played an active role in the emergence of the idea of having a smart electricity grid. Smart Grid meets the requirements of the complex operating environment on electric power systems and also gives the solutions for global energy and environmental problems which are essential public concern of the last century. The success rate of these solutions offered by Smart Grid is directly related to the efficiency of energy distribution among the actors in the electric power grid. Since Smart Grid is a user-oriented system, users' behaviour directly affects energy distribution efficiency. Therefore, analyzing the behaviour of actors using different approaches and scenarios provides information to discover the most effective energy efficiency distribution for the network. In this thesis, the microgrid structure (Piemonte, Italy) is analyzed to classify the actors' behaviours. Graph theory is used to represent the microgrid to have better understanding during the analysis. By using different scenarios and approaches (energy distribution from the producer side and the consumer side), the performance metrics after the distributions are calculated, and the status of actors is evaluated considering the constraints and approaches in the scenarios. According to the results of the analysis, the consumer-oriented energy distribution 70% more efficient than the producer-oriented one. Besides, even in the cases that path failure probabilities and consumer status after the distribution are equal, the consumer-oriented energy distribution approaches follow more balanced behaviour than the scenarios performed by using producer-oriented approaches. Keywords: Smart Grid, Microgrid, Energy-Efficient Distribution