Demand management with energy generation and storage in collectives

In this paper, we focus on demand side management in consumer collectives with community owned renewable energy generation and storage facilities for effective integration of renewable energy with the existing fossil fuel-based power supply system. The collective buys energy as a group through a central coordinator who also decides about the storage and usage of renewable energy produced by the collective. Our objective is to design coordination algorithms to minimize the cost of electricity consumption of the consumer collective while allowing the consumers to make their own consumption decisions based on their private consumption constraints and preferences. Minimizing the cost is not only of interest to the consumers but is also socially desirable because it reduces the consumption at times of peak demand. We develop an iterative coordination algorithm in which the coordinator makes the storage decision and shapes the demands of the consumers by designing a virtual price signal for the agents. We prove that our algorithm converges, and it achieves the optimal solution under realistic conditions. We also present simulation results based on real world consumption data to quantify the performance of our algorithm.