Discovering Energy Communities for Microgrids on the Power Grid

Smart grid has integrated an increasing number of distributed energy resources to improve efficiency and flexibility of power generation and consumption as well as the resilience of the power grid. The energy consumers on the power grid (e.g., households) equipped with distributed energy resources can be considered as “microgrids” that both generate and consume electricity. To facilitate energy management, in this paper, we study the energy community discovery problems which identify multiple kinds of communities for the microgrids, such as homogeneous energy community (HEC), mixed energy community (MEC) and self-sufficient energy community (SEC). We present algorithms to discover such energy communities for microgrids, and finally experimentally validate the performance of the algorithms using real datasets.