Risk Management of Energy Communities with Hydrogen Production and Storage Technologies

The distributed integration of renewable energy sources plays a central role in the decarbonization of economies. In this regard, energy communities arise as a promising entity to coordinate groups of proactive consumers (prosumers) and incentivize the investment on clean technologies. However, the uncertain nature of renewable energy generation, residential loads, and trading tariffs pose important challenges, both at the operational and economic levels. We study how this management can be directly undertaken by an arbitrageur that, making use of an adequate price tariff system, serves as an intermediary with the central electricity market to coordinate different types of prosumers under risk aversion. In particular, we consider a sequential futures and spot market where the aggregated shortage or excess of energy within the community can be traded. We aim to study the impact of the integration of hydrogen production and storage systems, together with a parallel hydrogen market, on the community operation. These interactions are modeled as a game theoretical setting in the form of a stochastic two-stage bilevel optimization problem, which is latter reformulated without approximation as a single-level mixed-integer linear problem (MILP). An extensive set of numerical experiments based on real data is performed to study the operation of the energy community under different technical and economical conditions. Results indicate that the optimal involvement in futures and spot markets is highly conditioned by the community's risk aversion and self-sufficiency levels. Moreover, the external hydrogen market has a direct effect on the community's internal price-tariff system, and depending on the market conditions, may worsen the utility of individual prosumers.