Planning and Operational Aspects of Individual and Clustered Multi-Energy Microgrid Options

With the restructuring of the power system, household-level end users are becoming more prominent participants by integrating renewable energy sources and smart devices and becoming flexible prosumers. The use of microgrids is a way of aggregating local end users into a single entity and catering for the consumption needs of shareholders. Various microgrid architectures are the result of the local energy community following different decarbonisation strategies and are frequently not optimised in terms of size, technology or other influential factors for energy systems. This paper discusses the operational and planning aspects of three different microgrid setups, looking at them as individual market participants within a local electricity market. This kind of implementation enables mutual trade between microgrids without additional charges, where they can provide flexibility and balance for one another. The developed models take into account multiple uncertainties arising from photovoltaic production, day-ahead electricity prices and electricity load. A total number of nine case studies and sensitivity analyses are presented, from daily operation to the annual planning perspective. The systematic study of different microgrid setups, operational principles/goals and cooperation mechanisms provides a clear understanding of operational and planning benefits: the electrification strategy of decarbonising microgrids outperforms gas and hydrogen technologies by a significant margin. The value of coupling different types of multi-energy microgrids, with the goal of joint market participation, was not proven to be better on a yearly level compared to the operation of same technology-type microgrids. Additional analyses focus on introducing distribution and transmission fees to an MG cooperation model and allow us to come to the conclusion of there being a minor impact on the overall operation.