Energy communities designed to evolve for future smart grids
From functioning to evolving: A complex systems perspective on future self-organised federated energy communities
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Summary
Energy systems are becoming more complex as renewable sources and smart technology grow. The authors argue that looking at these systems like living, evolving networks helps manage their unpredictable nature. They study successful systems like the Internet and agile software to suggest ways energy communities can self-organize and adapt over time. These communities produce and trade energy locally while respecting grid limits, aiming for flexibility and fairness. The challenge is to find rules that balance safety and innovation for widespread, reliable operation.
What this means in practice
- •For energy grid operators: Design coordination methods that allow local energy communities to trade and manage resources while maintaining grid reliability and adapting to change.
- •For smart energy system developers: Implement architectures for autonomous energy communities that self-organize based on evolving constraints inspired by complex systems and agile principles.
A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.
Authors
Abdorasoul Ghasemi
Abstract
Energy networks face a paradigm shift driven by renewable integration, uncertainty about required flexibility, distributed markets, and smart demand. Increasing asset interactions, cyber dependencies on communication and computation systems, and the deployment of AI agents demand a holistic, system-wide approach to understand the system's emergent behaviour. These transformations affect energy generation, demand adaptation, grid operations, and market dynamics, forming a complex engineered \emph{system of systems}. We argue that a complex-systems perspective can help to understand this evolution. Drawing lessons from two highly successful large-scale engineered systems, the Internet and agile software engineering, we highlight how prioritising design for evolution over traditional design for functionality enables energy systems to adapt to net-zero dynamics and handle unforeseen uncertainties. We discuss how the notion of federated energy communities (FEC), which aims for an open energy system with distributed coordination, aligns with this perspective. In FECs, each EC produces, stores, and manages its own energy, enabling it to trade with peers, respect grid constraints, and reach fair agreements. Beyond regulatory issues, the main challenge is identifying constraints that can orchestrate EC operations at the scale and reliability standards required of power networks, without unnecessarily limiting the innovation needed for system evolution. We then conclude with tentative design principles for future decentralised, self-organised energy networks through the lens of design for evolution, and how to apply them to a bottom-up architecture of autonomous energy communities.