Aggregation effects for microgrid communities at varying sizes and prosumer-consumer ratios

Abstract Self-consumption is an increasingly economically attractive solution for electricity generated by distributed energy resources, which also reduces transmission losses, power line overload and grid instability. Yet, at single-building scale, production and demand do often not coincide. Microgrids are proposed as a means to trade surplus energy produced with local prosumers and consumers, to take advantage of complementary load profiles. Here we define a consumer as a single metered residential unit, a prosumer as a consumer with a photovoltaic system, which first uses the on-site energy generated prior to exporting the surplus, and the microgrid as a clearly defined number of both prosumers and consumers. In this article, we systematically analyze to what extent varying microgrid sizes and prosumer-consumer ratios affect local self-consumption and self-sufficiency rates. To that end, we developed a simulation model that uses real-world load profiles from 4190 residential buildings as input data. We find that the prosumer-to-consumer ratio is more important than the absolute microgrid size, for microgrids sizes greater than ten. The results also indicate that prosumer-to-consumer ratios in the range of 40%-60% have the best performance. Each simulation is also compared to the baseline scenario of a stand-alone prosumer, which shows significantly better self-consumption ratios and self-sufficiency ratios for microgrids due to aggregation effects. Finally, this work may also be used as a reference to design residential microgrid communities for various prosumer-consumer compositions and various production-to-demand ratios.