This paper presents an advanced market bidding and operation strategy for the joint participation of a solar plant with storage in Energy and Secondary Reserve Markets (SRM). A linear optimization is applied in order to calculate the optimal day-ahead and intraday market bids through a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach, considering solar generation forecast, hourly market prices as well as battery acquisition, operating and degradation costs. Moreover, several rule-based strategies are selected to participate in secondary reserve markets, focused on more profitable and reliable hours through the estimation of market prices and the expected operation of the battery. Finally, the real-time operation tackles all the uncertain parameters, such as the reserve requirements and solar forecast errors, with the objective of achieving an optimal trade-off between market profits, battery costs and market technical fulfillments. Several market strategies have been compared in techno-economic terms with annual real market data. Regarding the most advanced strategy, market benefits are improved 6.42% from base case and non-fulfillment level of SRM is reduced up to 1.49%.

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology has emerged as a promising solution for enhancing the integration of electric vehicles (EVs) into the electric grid, offering benefits, such as distributed energy resource (DER) integration, grid stability support, and peak demand management, among others, as well as environmental advantages. This study provides a comprehensive review of V2G systems, with a specific focus on the role of the communication, as they have been identified as key enablers, as well as the challenges that V2G must face. It begins by introducing the fundamentals of V2G systems, including their architecture, operation, and a description of the benefits for different sectors. It then delves into the communication technologies and protocols in V2G systems, highlighting the key requirements in achieving reliable and efficient communication between EVs and the different agents involved. A comprehensive review of communication standards is described, as well as the main communication technologies, which are evaluated in terms of their suitability for V2G applications. Furthermore, the study discusses the challenges and environmental implications of V2G technology, emphasizing the importance of addressing strong and reliable communications to maximize its potential benefits. Finally, future research directions and potential solutions for overcoming challenges in V2G systems are outlined, offering useful insights for researchers, policymakers, and administrations as well as related industry stakeholders.

The European Union’s vision for energy transition not only foresees decarbonization of the electricity sector, but also requires commitment across different sectors such as gas, heating, and cooling through an integrated approach. It also sets local energy communities at the center of the energy transition as a bottom-up approach to achieve these ambitious decarbonization goals. The energy hub is seen as a promising conceptual model to foster the optimization of multi-carrier energy systems and cross-sectoral interaction. Especially in the context of local energy communities, the energy hub concept can enable the optimal design, management, and control of future integrated and digitalized networks where multiple energy carriers operate seamlessly and in complementarity with each other. In that sense, the optimal design and operation of energy hubs are of critical importance, especially under the effect of multiple objectives taking on board not only technical, but also other aspects that would enable the sustainability of local energy communities, such as economic and environmental. This paper aims to provide an in-depth review of the literature surrounding the existing state-of-the-art approaches that are related to the design and operation optimization of energy hubs by also exploring their interaction with the external network and multiple markets. As the planning and operation of an energy hub is a multifaceted research topic, this paper covers issues such as the different optimization methods, optimization problems formulation including objective functions and constraints, and the hubs’ optimal market participation, including flexibility mechanisms. By systematizing the existing literature, this paper highlights any limitations of the approaches so far and identifies the need for further research and enhancement of the existing approaches.

Energy management in hybrid and electric vehicles is a key factor to improve the operational performance and meet the efficiency objectives defined in the transport sector. Thus, optimized energy management strategies (EMS), before being integrated in a real system, need to be experimentally validated in test-bench platforms in order to identify the possible deviations from the expected simulation-based performance. This way, minimizing the time needed for implementation and field-test on the real application. An economical and flexible mean of validating these strategies is the Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation. Therefore, this work aims to present the design approach and comparison, by means of experimental tests, of two optimized (simulation-based) EMSs proposed for a hybrid electric bus (HEB) focusing on the real-time operational performance. Both EMSs handle the proper power split behaviour of the vehicle demand among a genset (internal combustion engine + electric generator) and a hybrid energy storage system (combining Li-ion batteries with super-capacitors). The experimental platform consists in a scaled test-bench emulating the electrical DC grid of a HEB. This test-bench, combined with software models to control the power electronic devices, allows to emulate the real behaviour of the genset, battery, super-capacitor, traction and auxiliary loads.