Coordinating Distributed and Flexible Resources: A Case-study of Residential Cooperatives

The increasing number of residential energy cooperatives raises the importance of forming a local prosumer marketplace that is capable of managing energy and flexibility exchange efficiently. However, the coordination and control of independently operated flexible resources (e.g. storage, demand response) imposes critical challenges arising from the heterogeneity of the flexible resources, conflict of interests, and impact on the grid. Therefore, designing a simple yet efficient coordination mechanism that works on these distributed resources is of the utmost importance. We introduce a simulation model to study energy exchange with flexibility coordination while working towards an efficient allocation mechanism. A case study analysing different allocation mechanisms and consequent losses (compared to a base-case of No flexibility) in numerical experiments over real demand/generation profiles of the Pecan Street dataset elucidates the efficacy in energy and flexibility allocation while promoting cooperation between co-located flexibilities in residential cooperatives through local exchange.