Decentralized Optimization and Power Flow Analysis for a Local Energy Community

The coordination of a community of electricity prosumers using mathematical optimization is studied in this paper. The resulting optimization problem is cast as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) with coupling constraints regarding the community exchanged power at the transformer level. Dual decomposition is used to divide the problem into subproblems that are solved by each prosumer, while limited information is exchanged with the community coordinator. This approach provides feasible solutions regarding the coupling constraints in a finite number of iterations. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in enforcing constraints at the transformer level, a case study using the IEEE European LV Test feeder is presented. The optimization results are further verified by performing a power flow analysis at different iterations. Finally, this analysis provides additional insights about the condition of the network that needs to be considered in the model in the future.