A sharing economy model for a sustainable community energy storage considering end-user comfort

A promising solution for the current and future power system challenges like the increasing penetration of demand-side distributed energy resources and the economies of scale of individual energy storage systems could be the concept of the smart Community Energy Storage (CES). This paper focuses on developing an energy cooperation framework between photovoltaic prosumers and CES. In the proposed structure, an appropriate environment is provided in the energy community to consider several smart homes that together form an energy community. They can store and generate energy by some central devices, including combined heat and power unit, thermal storage system, and electrical energy storage. Furthermore, each end-user individually owns a rooftop PV system and a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system where the uncertainty of the PV generation unit is modeled by a scenario-based approach. The main question of this study is what benefits an energy community provides to the set of end-users. The goal of the energy community manager of the smart CES as the objective function of the scheduling problem is to minimize energy cost and end-user discomfort level, where ε-constraint method is used to solve the multi-objective CES scheduling problem. The main contribution of this paper is introducing the sharing economy concept and considering the role of occupants' thermal comfort, the impacts of time importance and end-user thermal sensitivity, and the impact of thermal comfort in the CES. The proposed model is structured as a mixed integer linear programming problem that is implemented in the GAMS software. Results show that by using CES, the energy cost decreases about 28.48% while the end-user discomfort level significantly improves.