Adaptive energy management of storage-enabled microgrids using emission-aware demand-side flexibility aggregation

Microgrids play a key role in distributed energy systems by facilitating the integration of renewable energy sources, maintaining system reliability, and creating economic value. However, optimising their operation remains challenging, as it requires balancing conflicting objectives under operational constraints. This paper presents a novel customer-centric adaptive microgrid energy management framework using a two-stage ε-constraint multi-objective optimisation approach to balance competing objectives: minimising operational costs and emissions, enhancing technical performance through load factor improvement, and maximising customer benefits via dynamic reward allocation. The proposed two-stage response mechanism, formulated as a non-convex MINLP, exploits the flexibility of both economic- and comfort-oriented consumers within a coordinated system optimisation framework. The first stage models consumer participation using a coefficient of participation (CoP) and an incentive-based structure, enabling significant load adjustments. In the second stage, the microgrid operator exploits the aggregated flexibility of comfort-oriented consumers to solve the multi-objective problem and generate feasible optimal solutions. To improve computational efficiency, this paper reformulates the model as an MIQP using the Big-M method and McCormick relaxation. The framework is validated against real-world data from an Australian grid-connected microgrid. Results indicate that, relative to a no-flexibility baseline, economic-oriented consumers reduce individual energy consumption by up to 33%, with load factor improvements of up to 10%. The analysis also reveals clear trade-offs among the objectives by generating solutions with an average computation time of approximately 3 seconds per feasible solution, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed coordinated energy management in balancing technical, economic, and social objectives in microgrid operation.