A model for energy optimization in power-shared community

Solar power, regarded as natural, clean and inexhaustible energy, has nowadays attracted attention of both academic researchers and industrial practitioners. Solar panel is a popular device for family to heat water and to produce electricity to feed home electric devices. Based on the fact that home devices are commonly used in the evening, so it is intuitive and advisable to store electricity produced in day time into battery for evening use. However, equipping battery in every family may create highly expensive storage costs, while sharing large-capacity battery (storage facility) by families in the same community is a fine approach since the marginal battery cost decreases with its capacity. Based on this power-shared community scenario, we will propose an energy optimization model (EOM) to determine the storage quota given to each family and optimize in the global community level the usage and storage of energy produced by families. The computational results show that IBM ILog Cplex reaches efficiently the optimal solution over different kinds of instances, which hints EOM is realistic and tractable in the future power-shared community. © 2012 IEEE.