Abstract :
[en] Growing awareness of the effects of man-made global warming is leading societies worldwide to re-evaluate our seemingly ever-increasing energy requirements. The need to understand and mitigate the issues brought about by our current use of the world's resources has thus become a pivotal element in the political agendas of most regions. Accordingly, curbing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions has been the goal of many of the political decisions of the past decade. In this context, the electricity sector is undergoing deep structural changes to accommodate intermittent renewable electricity generation resources into a system originally designed to rely on dispatchable power plants to supply our energy needs. One of the main changes consists of a decentralisation of the sector, bringing the generation assets closer to the place of final consumption. This creates regulatory challenges that may jeopardise the integration of distributed renewable energy resources (DER).
This PhD dissertation presents several research contributions dealing with these challenges.
In the first part of our work, we have created a simulation-based approach to study the effects of different regulatory frameworks on the deployment of DER installations. DER deployment, in turn, is shown to have a notable impact on the revenue of the distribution system operator (DSO), which is also assessed with our simulator. Our approach is designed so as to offer a tool for policy makers and regulators to discriminate between different regulatory frameworks depending on their impact on the distribution network, before implementing them in real life.
The second part of our dissertation models different decentralised electricity markets where consumers may exchange electricity, focusing on the concept of renewable energy communities (REC). We have designed a model of interaction that simulates an REC where its members can offer flexibility services by means of a centralised agent such as the REC manager. In addition, we analyse the allocation of local electricity generation among the REC members, and propose an algorithm based on \emph{repartition keys} to minimise the total electricity costs of the REC.
The modelling tools developed in this thesis highlight a trade-off between promoting the integration of DER and containing their impact on the DSO revenue. In addition, they show that creating RECs may help maximise the use of local production and, therefore, lower the electricity costs of these communities.
Despite having been studied for a few decades now, the promotion of DER is still very much in the political agenda in many regions. Unstable policies concerning these technologies, along with an insufficient understanding of the challenges they pose to the traditional electricity system, have hindered their natural integration into the electricity networks. These problems, though deeply studied in this thesis, call for further research to fight man-made global warming.
