Financially Stimulating Local Economies by Exploiting Communities’ Microgrids: Power Trading and Hybrid Techno-Economic (HTE) Model

Abstract

This paper thoroughly considers the potential of installing microgrids (MGs) in communities that suffer from the economic crisis in order to financially stimulate their local economies. Exploiting the state-of-the-art evolutions in the fields of the MG technology, the Hybrid Techno-Economic (HTE) model is proposed as a suitable techno-economic tool for assessing the power generation/consumption behaviour and the financial performance of these communities' MGs. The contribution of this paper is four-fold. First, the HTE model is presented. HTE model describes a theoretical analysis that is suitable for studying community's MGs. Appropriately concatenating one well-validated technical module and one new economic module, the HTE model quickly and conveniently reveals the power generation/consumption and economic profile of community's MGs. Second, HTE model is integrated through an extended portfolio of power and financial metrics. The applied metrics study the influence of generation and consumption power changes on community's MGs. The validity and the efficiency of the HTE model are examined with respect to these power changes while the impact of these changes on the power and cash flows of community's MGs are assessed. Third, a cost-benefit analysis of the operation of community's MGs accompanied with a financial stability analysis is also demonstrated. The main outcome of these analyses is the daily total benefit (TB) of community's MGs with its respective financial bounds. Fourth, the contribution of the energy arbitrage and the power production mix among available power sources of community's MGs to the daily TB is investigated. Apart from promoting the ecological awareness, this paper tries to become a catching argument for the communities in order to exploit the community's MGs. 132communities around the world. While the severity of these problems varies from one community to another, new policies have to be adopted as well as new tools and mechanisms have to be invented, restructured, and overhauled [1]- [4]. In a regional basis, the consequences of the financial and economic crisis mainly affects four sectors of community's economy [1], [5], [6]: (i) Revenues: The revenues of the communities, which are either generated by local taxation or derived from state transfers, have undergone dramatic declines; (ii) Expenditures: The communities suffering from the crisis show high unemployment and significant slowdown of their local economic activities. Hence, additional funding is required so that the general social welfare status is maintained; (iii) Bank financing: Apart from the states, the crisis critically affects the banking institutions as well as their cash liquidity. Hence, the cost of money increases while the communities face serious difficulties in contracting loans in order to satisfy their current budget needs and projections; (iv) Investments: The crisis environment discourages either foreign or local investors. This implies that various projects, which could create extra financial fluidity in loca...

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