7. Energy Solutions for Smart Buildings Integrated with Local Energy Communities

The energy neutrality of buildings is subject to different interpretations and in the context of a building or neighborhood (or, equivalently, district), it can be understood to mean “the generation of equal electricity, as it consumes”. Nevertheless, it is found out that even though buildings can achieve energy neutrality annually, the energy self-sufficiency achieved is not satisfactory. Most of the locally produced electricity is fed back to the grid because of the mismatch of supply and demand. However, nearly self-sufficient buildings and neighborhoods will be a future requirement for newly arising smart buildings and neighborhoods with the electrification of energy systems. Therefore, in this chapter, with the aim of improving energy self-sufficiency, an analysis was conducted for a renovated smart neighborhood. In this context, a smart neighborhood is a group of highly performing houses, equipped with enhanced energy efficiency measures. These houses include improved insulation and high-efficiency heat pumps, electric water heaters, domestic appliances, and photovoltaic panels. In this neighborhood, to tackle the challenges associated with multiple distributed energy resources, and to design (size) and control them simultaneously, an optimization problem is developed and partitioned into sub-problems in a distributed manner. The study showed with the introduction of different storage systems and optimal smart control of these systems, the energy self-sufficiency of the neighborhood can be increased from the current 10% value to 71.5%.