Exploring optimal market operations and grid effects in an office building energy community: A case study

In this paper, we study optimal market operations and grid effects of office building from an energy community perspective. Commercial buildings such as offices can include many stakeholders and new flexible assets that can offer suitable use cases to form energy communities or enter energy and reserve markets. The office building we focus in this study has a real-world counterpart with historical measurement data and involves three stakeholders and their assets. The stakeholders are the owner, the tenant, and the operator of flexible assets. These assets are the battery energy storage system (BESS) and the electric vehicles (EV) charging system (EVCS) that both can operate in response to energy price fluctuations and in a reserve market. Different cases are studied where either the owner or the tenant is paying the EV charging, and where the flexibility of the EV charging is either active or not. We show that, when the owner pays for the energy of the EVCS and the tenant is using it, there is a beneficial case to form a coalition between them and share the benefits. Operative cost-benefit calculations are conducted where the community benefits are shared according to the Shapley value and the power flows at the building’s connection point are simulated based on the market operations. The sensitivity of the flexibility and the maximum power of EVCS to the results are studied. Harnessing benefits from the markets shows significant effects on the power flows at the connection point.