Social arrangements, technical designs and impacts of energy communities: A review

Gjorgievski, Vladimir; Cundeva, Snezana; Georghiou, George E.

doi:10.1016/j.renene.2021.01.078

Cited by 246 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 107 publications

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“…The need of meeting an increasing share of energy demand using renewable sources, combined with the uncertain production of wind and solar power plants, is raising pressure on the stability of existing power systems. The creation of the so-called Energy Communities (ECs), i.e., local, organized and coordinated aggregates of consumers and prosumers [21], is widely recognised as a useful tool to alleviate this burden, attract private financing, meet the environmental targets, and ultimately addressing the Energy Transition challenge [27].…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…ECs in the European Union alone [10], and others in US, Canada and New Zeland [7,23,21], yet, a surge in the numbers is expected, as most countries have not finalized the adoption of specific policies [21,27]. Being among the world leaders in Energy Transition, the EU has approved the first directive (RED II) on Renewable Energy Communities (REC) in mid 2018, followed by the IEMD directive that broadens the concept to that of "Citizenship Energy Community" (CEC) also accounting for sharing of non-renewable energy sources [27].…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Optimal sizing of energy communities with fair revenue sharing and exit clauses: Value, role and business model of aggregators and users

2021

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Energy communities (ECs) are essential policy tools to meet the Energy Transition goals, as they can promote renewable energy sources, demand side management, demand response and citizen participation in energy matters. However, to fully unleash their potential, their design and scheduling requires a coordinated technical operation that the community itself may be ill-equipped to manage, in particular in view of the mutual technical and legal constraints ensuing from a coordinated design. Aggregators and Energy Service COmpanies (ESCOs) can perform this support role, but only provided that their goals are aligned to those of the community, not to incur in the agency problem.In this study, we propose a business model for aggregators of ECs, and its corresponding technical optimization problem, taking into account all crucial aspects: i) alleviating the risk of the agency problem, ii) fairly distributing the reward awarded to the EC, iii) estimating the fair payment for the aggregator services, and iv) defining appropriate exit clauses that rule what happens when a user leaves the EC. A detailed mathematical model is derived and discussed, employing several fair and theoretically-consistent reward distribution schemes, some of which are, to the best of our knowledge, proposed here for the first time. A case study is developed to quantify the value of the aggregator and compare the coordinated solution provided by the aggregator with non-coordinated configurations, numerically illustrating the impact of the reward distribution schemes.The results show that, in the case study, the aggregator enables reducing costs by 16% with respect to a baseline solution, and enables reaching 52.5% renewable share and about 46% self/shared consumption, whereas these same numbers are only 28-35% for the non-coordinated case. Our results suggest that the aggregator fair retribution is around 16-24% the added benefit produced with respect to the noncoordinated solution, and that stable reward distribution schemes such as Shapley/Core or Nucleolus are

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Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal sizing of energy communities with fair revenue sharing and exit clauses: Value, role and business model of aggregators and users

2021

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“…On the technical side, a distributed energy system can alleviate pressure on centralized grids, increasing security reliability and resilience in the event of price volatility or energy emergencies [26]. From a financial perspective, although costs per unit and installation costs are liable to vary widely, more companies are likely to be involved, with benefits spread over significantly greater numbers of interested parties, leading to greater financial resilience [27]. In Spain, it is currently cheaper to produce a KWh of energy through PV than purchasing it from the grid [26], making decentralized forms of energy production attractive as an investment to households and communities.…”

Section: Legally Permitted Activities In Energy Sectormentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Just Energy Transition, Barriers and Opportunities for Positive Energy District Creation in Spain

Hearn

Castaño-Rosa

2021

Sustainability

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To mitigate the effects of climate change, the European Commission created a Strategic Energy Technology Plan committing to forming 100 Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) by 2025. These are considered to potentially be major instruments for decarbonization in a just transition. This plan has led to some districts being defined as PEDs, although none have fully met the criteria to be a PED yet. Research shows that new forms of energy ownership and production, as could potentially be found in PEDs, could help reduce energy poverty, which affects a significant segment of the population, as households can reduce their energy expenditure as well as improve their energy behavior. This paper set out to shed light on the PED landscape, investigating the barriers and opportunities to PED creation in Spain and its potential to mitigate energy poverty. We conducted a literature review on community-owned energy in Spain, followed with expert interviews (energy researchers, stakeholders, and NGOs) who focus on sustainability issues in Spain. Results show a number of barriers (lack of knowledge and awareness, and lack of trust from consumers) and opportunities connected with the creation of PEDs. In conclusion, policymaker engagement and support play a key role in successfully implementing PEDs.

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“…As a possible solution for the financing and wider diffusion of renewable energy systems, micro-grids, and in general positive energy districts, are gaining importance in industry and academia. A comprehensive literature review on the subject would perhaps be beyond the scope of this study; nevertheless, the reader might consult the work of Gjorgievski et al [26], of which a set of highlights is attempted. The review examines three broad aspects: one is mainly occupied with social arrangements, one is focused on the quality of system design, and one on economic, environmental, and social impacts of the energy communities.…”

Section: Relevant Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The present study is focused on the operational phase, but it starts from an optimally design shared PV system (see Sections 1.3 and 2.5). In the last section of [26] the economic, environmental, technical and social impacts of micro-grid are discussed by a large set of empirical and theoretical studies.…”

Section: Relevant Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agent Based Modelling of a Local Energy Market: A Study of the Economic Interactions between Autonomous PV Owners within a Micro-Grid

et al. 2021

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Urban Photovoltaic (PV) systems can provide large fractions of the residential electric demand at socket parity (i.e., a cost below the household consumer price). This is obtained without necessarily installing electric storage or exploiting tax funded incentives. The benefits of aggregating the electric demand and renewable output of multiple households are known and established; in fact, regulations and pilot energy communities are being implemented worldwide. Financing and managing a shared urban PV system remains an unsolved issue, even when the profitability of the system as a whole is demonstrable. For this reason, an agent-based modelling environment has been developed and is presented in this study. It is assumed that an optimal system (optimized for self-sufficiency) is shared between 48 households in a local grid of a positive energy district. Different scenarios are explored and discussed, each varying in number of owners (agents who own a PV system) and their pricing behaviour. It has been found that a smaller number of investors (i.e., someone refuse to join) provokes an increase of the earnings for the remaining investors (from 8 to 74% of the baseline). Furthermore, the pricing strategy of an agent shows improvement potential without knowledge of the demand of others, and thus it has no privacy violations.

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Social arrangements, technical designs and impacts of energy communities: A review

Cited by 246 publications

References 107 publications

Optimal sizing of energy communities with fair revenue sharing and exit clauses: Value, role and business model of aggregators and users

Optimal sizing of energy communities with fair revenue sharing and exit clauses: Value, role and business model of aggregators and users

Towards a Just Energy Transition, Barriers and Opportunities for Positive Energy District Creation in Spain

Agent Based Modelling of a Local Energy Market: A Study of the Economic Interactions between Autonomous PV Owners within a Micro-Grid

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