Advances in renewable energy generation and introduction of the government targets to improve energy efficiency gave rise to a concept of a Zero Energy Building (ZEB). A ZEB is a building whose net energy usage over a year is zero, i.e., its energy use is not larger than its overall renewables generation. A collection of ZEBs forms a Zero Energy Community (ZEC). This paper addresses the problem of energy sharing in such a community. This is different from previously addressed energy sharing between buildings as our focus is on the improvement of community energy status, while traditionally research focused on reducing losses due to transmission and storage, or achieving economic gains. We model this problem in a multi-agent environment and propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based solution. Each building is represented by an intelligent agent that learns over time the appropriate behaviour to share energy. We have evaluated the proposed solution in a multi-agent simulation built using osBrain. Results indicate that with time agents learn to collaborate and learn a policy comparable to the optimal policy, which in turn improves the ZEC's energy status. Buildings with no renewables preferred to request energy from their neighbours rather than from the supply grid.
Renewable energy harvested from the environment is an attractive option for providing green energy to homes. Unfortunately, the intermittent nature of renewable energy results in a mismatch between when these sources generate energy and when homes demand it. This mismatch reduces the efficiency of using harvested energy by either i) requiring batteries to store surplus energy, which typically incurs 20 energy conversion losses; or ii) using net metering to transmit surplus energy via the electric grid's AC lines, which severely limits the maximum percentage of possible renewable penetration. In this paper, we propose an alternative structure wherein nearby homes explicitly share energy with each other to balance local energy harvesting and demand in microgrids. We develop a novel energy sharing approach to determine which homes should share energy, and when, to minimize system-wide efficiency losses. We evaluate our approach in simulation using real traces of solar energy harvesting and home consumption data from a deployment in Amherst, MA. We show that our system i) reduces the energy loss on the AC line by 60 without requiring large batteries, ii) scales up performance with larger battery capacities, and iii) is robust to changes in microgrid topology. Unprecedented high volumes of data are becoming available with the growth of the advanced metering infrastructure. These are expected to benefit planning and operation of the future power systems and to help customers transition from a passive to an active role. In this paper, we explore for the first time in the smart grid context the benefits of using deep reinforcement learning, a hybrid type of methods that combines reinforcement learning with deep learning, to perform on-line optimization of schedules for building energy management systems. The learning procedure was explored using two methods, Deep Q-learning and deep policy gradient, both of which have been extended to perform multiple actions simultaneously. The proposed approach was validated on the large-scale Pecan Street Inc. database. This highly dimensional database includes information about photovoltaic power generation, electric vehicles and buildings appliances. Moreover, these on-line energy scheduling strategies could be used to provide real-time feedback to consumers to encourage more efficient use of electricity. Buildings consume a significant amount of electricity, which is normally generated from dirty sources causing an increase in carbon footprints. To reduce carbon footprint, distributed renewable energy generation has been proposed. However, the amount of renewable energy harvested normally does not match the amount of energy consumed in individual homes. To address this mismatch, we propose a distributed solution to share renewable energy among homes, which form a microgrid. Specifically we (i) design an incentive-driven distributed energy sharing system (iDES) in a microgrid to enable effective energy sharing and reduce the communication overhead, and (ii) develop energy sharing pricing model to incentivize energy sharing. The energy sharing price generally reflects the installation costs of on-site renewable and energy storage units, the dynamic changes of energy supply-demand relationship, and the remaining energy level of batteries. We validated the effectiveness of our system with extensive evaluations that use empirical traces. The results show that our energy sharing pricing model can effectively motivate and encourage homes to share energy.   This paper addresses the problem of efficiently operating the storage devices in an electricity microgrid featuring photovoltaic (PV) panels with both shortand long-term storage capacities. The problem of optimally activating the storage devices is formulated as a sequential decision making problem under uncertainty where, at every time-step, the uncertainty comes from the lack of knowledge about future electricity consumption and weather dependent PV production. This paper proposes to address this problem using deep reinforcement learning. To this purpose, a specific deep learning architecture has been designed in order to extract knowledge from past consumption and production time series as well as any available forecasts. The approach is empirically illustrated in the case of a residential customer located in Belgium.