The integration of renewable energy systems in buildings leads to a reduction in energy bills for end users and a reduction in the carbon footprint of such buildings, usually referred to as prosumers. In addition, the installation of charging points for the electric vehicles of people working or living in these buildings can further improve the energy efficiency of the whole system if innovative technologies, such as vehicle-to-building (V2B) technologies, are implemented. The aim of this paper is to present an Energy Management System (EMS) based on mathematical programming that has been developed to optimally manage a prosumer building equipped with photovoltaics, a micro wind turbine and several charging points for electric vehicles. Capabilities curves of renewable power plant inverters are modelled within the EMS, as well as the possibility to apply power curtailment and V2B. The use of V2B technology reduces the amount of electricity purchased from the public grid, while the use of smart inverters for the power plants allows zero reactive power to be drawn from the grid. Levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is used to quantify curtailment costs, while penalties on reactive power absorption from the distribution network are evaluated in accordance with the current regulatory framework. Specifically, the model is applied to a prosumer building owned by the postal service in a large city in Italy. The paper reports the main results of the study and proposes a sensitivity analysis on the number of charging stations and vehicles, as well as on the consideration of different typical days characterized by different load and generation profiles. This paper also investigates how errors in forecasting energy production from renewable sources impact the optimal operation of the whole system.

The integration of renewable energy sources in the European power system is one of the main goals set by the European Union. In order to ease this integration, in recent years, Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) have been introduced that aim to increase the exploitation of renewable energy at the local level. This paper presents an Energy Management System (EMS) for an industrial microgrid owned and operated by a greentech company located in the north of Italy. The company is a member of an REC. The microgrid is made of interconnected busbars, integrating photovoltaic power plants, a fleet of electric vehicles, including company cars and delivery trucks supporting Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), dedicated charging stations, and a centralized battery energy storage system. The industrial site includes two warehouses, an office building, and a connection to the external medium-voltage network. The EMS is designed to optimize the operation of the microgrid and minimize the operating costs related to the sale and purchase of energy from the external network. Furthermore, as the company is a member of an REC, the EMS must try to follow a desired power exchange profile with the grid, suggested by the REC manager, with the purpose of maximizing the energy that is shared within the community and incentivized. The results demonstrate that, when minimizing only costs, local self-consumption is favored, leading to a Self-Sufficiency Rate (SSR) of 65.37%. On the other hand, when only the adherence to the REC manager’s desired power exchange profile is considered in the objective function, the SSR decreases to 56.43%, net operating costs increase, and the energy shared within the REC is maximized.

Italian generation scenario, as many others, is foreseeing the replacement of conventional Synchronous Generators (SGs) in favour of Renewable Energy Sources (RES), thus leading to a reduction of the overall system inertia. This paper provides a techno-economic methodology for the estimation of the amount of additional inertia that will be needed in the Italian Transmission Network in the 2030 scenario, in order to limit the Rate of Change of Frequency (RoCoF) within sustainable limits. Moreover, the algorithm optimally distributes Synthetic Inertia (SI) contributions from RES and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs) and the installation of new Synchronous Compensators (SCs) among the Italian market areas. The method is designed to be sufficiently simple to process a significant number of working scenarios and the relevant quantity of information owned by the TSO. Nevertheless, the results have shown to be highly accurate as demonstrated by comparison with detailed time domain simulations.

Islanded MGs represent an innovative and crucial way for the electrification of rural areas or small cities. The possibility of operating in islanded mode is extremely important, as well as the possibility of obtaining a proper control system without a stable communication link. This paper proposes a control strategy aiming at obtaining the regulation of a Microgrid composed by a Photovoltaic (PV) and Storage unit in islanded mode in a decentralized way and without a communication link. Thanks to the proposed approach, the availability and the continuity of service to the load is guaranteed. The design of inverter controllers focuses on the Model Predictive Control technique; the resulting project relies only on local measurements and nullifies both frequency and voltage errors. The combination of the advantages of the proposed method (i.e. no communication among devices and no secondary control) results in a solution that partially overcome the well-known approaches (classic droop and master/slave controllers).