Development and real-world deployment of a multi-agent system to support the operation of renewable energy communities

Despite the ongoing measures to support the development of Renewable Energy Communities (RECs), effectively managing energy production, consumption, and sharing, while balancing members’ needs, remains a major challenge. This paper presents a Multi-Agent System-based Community Energy Management System, designed to manage interactions and real-time energy exchanges within a REC to tackle the referred challenge in line with European legislation. The developed system has been deployed in real-world conditions considering a REC located in Portugal, unlike previous studies that rely on simulation. Additionally, the energy flexibility provided by second-life batteries has been controlled by the system to improve self-consumption of local generation and increase benefits of energy sharing in different scenarios. The real-world case study revealed that the developed system demonstrated effective operation, including emergency procedures to prevent deep discharge of batteries. The collected results also show that collective self-consumption with dynamic sharing coefficients is the most interesting REC configuration in terms of global cost savings, reducing energy bills by 25–28 % and 20–24 % when comparing to scenarios where individual self-consumption with fixed and dynamic sharing coefficients are applied, respectively.