A Renewable Energy Community of DC Nanogrids for Providing Balancing Services

The massive expansion of Distributed Energy Resources and schedulable loads have forced a variation of generation, transmission, and final usage of electricity towards the paradigm of Smart Communities microgrids and of Renewable Energy Communities. In the paper, the use of multiple DC microgrids for residential applications, i.e., the nanogrids, in order to compose and create a renewable energy community, is hypothesized. The DC Bus Signaling distributed control strategy for the power management of each individual nanogrid is applied to satisfy the power flow requests sent from an aggregator. It is important to underline that this is an adaptive control strategy, i.e., it is used when the nanogrid provides a service to the aggregator and when not. In addition, the value of the DC bus voltage of each nanogrid is communicated to the aggregator. In this way, the aggregator is aware of the regulation capacity that each nanogrid can provide and which flexible resources are used to provide this capacity. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is demonstrated via numerical experiments. The energy community considered in the paper consists of five nanogrids, interfaced to a common ML-LV substation. The nanogrids, equipped with a photovoltaic plant and a set of lithium-ion batteries, participate in the balancing service depending on its local generation and storage capacity.