  Distributed renewable energy systems are now widely installed in many
buildings, transforming the buildings into electricity prosumers. Existing
studies have developed some advanced building side controls that enable
renewable energy sharing and that aim to optimise building-cluster-level
performance via regulating the energy storage charging/ discharging. However,
the flexible demand shifting ability of electric vehicles is not considered in
these building side controls. For instance, the electric vehicle charging will
usually start once they are plugged into charging stations. But, in such
charging period the renewable generation may be insufficient to cover the EV
charging load, leading to grid electricity imports. Consequently, the
building-cluster-level performance is not optimised. Therefore, this study
proposes a coordinated control of building prosumers for improving the
cluster-level performance, by making use of energy sharing and storage
capability of electricity batteries in both buildings and EVs. An EV
charging/discharging model is first developed. Then, based on the predicted
future 24h electricity demand and renewable generation data, the coordinated
control first considers the whole building cluster as one integrated building
and optimises its operation as well as the EV charging/discharging using
genetic algorithm. Next, the operation of individual buildings in the future
24h is coordinated using nonlinear programming. For validation, the developed
control has been tested on a real building cluster in Ludvika, Sweden. The
study results show that the developed control can increase the cluster-level
daily renewable self-consumption rate by 19% and meanwhile reduce the daily
electricity bills by 36% compared with the conventional controls.
