Abstract
The last decade has witnessed a growing tendency to promote deeper exploitation of power systems infrastructure, postponing investments in networks reinforcement. In particular, the literature on smart grids research often emphasizes their potential to defer investments. The study reported in this paper analyses the impact of reinforcement decisions, comparing the long-term costs associated with different network conditions and economic analysis parameters. The results support the conclusion that network reinforcement deferral is not a panacea, as it often generates costly situations in the long-term. The challenge is not to find new ways to postpone investments, but to find the most beneficial criterion to trigger the grid reinforcements actions. Another contribution of the present work is a decision support system to identify the most economical network reinforcement criterion in terms of the peak to capacity ratio.

Abstract
Demand response (DR) programs can offer various benefits especially in microgrid environments with renewable energy systems (RESs) and energy storage technologies when effectively planned and managed. Accordingly, this study proposes an energy management approach for a neighborhood including residential end-users with photovoltaic (PV) systems, a shared energy storage system (ESS) and an electric vehicle (EV) fleet. The proposed approach presents a novel energy credit mechanism (ECM) for the EV fleet and households separately to exploit the EV batteries and store the excess PV energy in the neighborhood through the shared ESS for later use. End-users gain energy credits before a DR event and use these credits during the peak periods to minimize their total energy cost (TEC), resulted in a decrease in the peak demand. Also, the energy credits gained by the EV fleet are used through the vehicle-to-home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services with the same objective. In order to conduct a more realistic analysis, a battery degradation cost estimation model is employed and the uncertain behavior of the EV users is considered. The case studies show that the proposed optimization strategy has the capability of considerably reducing the energy costs and peak demand.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
This paper investigates prosumers' flexibility provision for the optimal operation of active distribution networks in a transactive energy (TE) market. From a prosumer point of view, flexibility can be provided to operators using renewable energy resources (RES) and demand response (DR) through home appliances with the ability to modify their consumption profiles. In the TE market model, the distribution system operator (DSO) is responsible for market-clearing mechanisms and controlling the net power exchange between the distribution network and the upstream grid. The contribution of this work is the enhancement of a strategy to reduce operational costs of an active distribution network by using prosumers' flexibility provision through an aggregator or a smart building coordinator. To this end, a TE market for both energy and flexibility trading at distribution networks is presented, demonstrating the possibility to fulfill DSO requirements through the flexibility contributions in the day-ahead (DA) and real-time (RT) markets.