• Energy Research
• 12. Responsible consumption close

Abstract Power systems with a high share of renewable energy sources face new challenges with respect to reliability management. Scientific literature argues that a paradigm shift is needed in terms of reliability management to efficiently integrate a large amount of renewable energy sources and the required flexibility services. Reliability management involves the use of indicators to support system operation and to assess its performance. Many indicators (proposed to be) used in power system reliability management are presented in technical and scientific literature. To coordinate the development, selection and use of indicators in power systems with a high share of renewable energy sources, this paper presents a structured and consistent overview of the characteristics and the scope of indicators currently in use and available in the literature. A transparent way to characterize indicators is proposed. Available indicators are analyzed in terms of the generic properties of an adequate indicator: relevance in the context of evolving reliability management, ease of use, data availability and reliability determined by the data accuracy. Based on this analysis, missing indicators, shortcomings of existing indicators and directions for future work in a practical and scientific context are identified.

This article addresses the suitable approaches for empowering energy citizens and smart energy communities through the development of community-based microgrid (C-MG) solutions while taking into consideration the functional architectural layers and system integration topologies, interoperability issues, strategies for consumer-centric energy trading under the local electricity market (LEM) mechanism, and socio-economic aspects. Thus, this article presents state-of-the-art microgrid solutions for the smart energy community along with their motivation, advantages and challenges, comprehensibly contrasted between the recommended generic architecture and every other reported structure. The notion of LEM for peer-to-peer (P2P) energy exchange inside a transactive energy system based on a flexible consumer-centric and bottom-up perspective towards the participation in the wholesale electricity market (WEM) is also reviewed and critically explored. Furthermore, the article reviews the interoperability issues in relation to the development of C-MG including energy trading facilities. The article’s overall contribution is that it paves the path for advanced research and industrialisation in the field of smart energy communities through the analytical recommendations of the C-MG architecture and DER (distributed energy resource) integration structure, considering the future trend of local energy markets and socio-economic aspects.

The concept of nearly zero energy (nZE) or sustainable buildings is prominently featured in the EU's energy strategy. However, transitioning to the envisioned era of “smartness” and “sustainability” involves overcoming several technoeconomic barriers: the difference in nature between different building archetypes, the simultaneous management of daily and yearly objectives by the energy management system (EMS), the impact on distribution grids and the required modelling detail. Focusing on addressing such concerns in the scope of the residential sector, this work proposes a generic mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) framework for modelling smart appliances (conventional and new advanced approaches) as well as for the seamless transition of residential homes from passive to smart, to sustainable and finally to grid-friendly entities. The framework includes an adaptive rolling horizon strategy accounting for the yearly nZE objective and a cost-grid impact trade-off strategy for handling flexibility requests. The energy management framework and all developed models are validated in several different scenarios, including a comprehensive sensitivity analysis.