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

Abstract

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

Optimal Allocation Method for a Fair Distribution of the Benefits in an Energy Community

“…Although the importance of the distribution of the benefit in EC is highly recognized, there are very few researches that assess it in detail as refs. [2,3,6,7]. Moreover, at a regulation level, no pronouncement is provided, and it remains a query that must be established within each EC.…”

“…Other approaches addressing the benefit obtained by individual users and not only by the whole system are, for example, the following: 1) an electricity pricing scheme to achieve a fair division of revenue between small‐scale electricity suppliers and end‐users is derived by the Shapley value [ 4 ] ; 2) a coalition of microgrids, the objective of which is to minimize the total operation cost, is composed of autonomous entities aiming at maximizing self‐interest through a cost allocation method which ensures a fair cost share among coalition members, guaranteeing the economic stability, by applying the Benders decomposition algorithm [ 5 ] ; 3) a criterion for allocating the total economic benefit relies on the investment, therefore the payoff is shared equally among tenants who participated in the investment to the same extent [ 6 ] ; and 4) the Nucleolus [ 7 ] distribution model encourages stability, but it grows exponentially with the size of the EC and does not satisfy fairness, by favoring members who do not install generation units. In [ 7 ] Shapley–Core–Nucleolus‐like allocation approaches are also assessed, and issues regarding fairness lack or computational burden are faced.…”

Coordination of specialised energy aggregators for balancing service provision

“…The ECAs consider self-consumption and self-sufficiency of the energy community, as well as synergies between a building manager and an aggregator of electric vehicles to solve a scheduling problem in a coordinated way [48]. The aggregation of energy communities is a timely topic that needs to find appropriate business models [49].…”

Renewable energy communities: do they have a business case in Flanders?

“…[15] introduced the regulatory aspects by analyzing different community configurations on the distribution grid, while optimizing the size of PV and battery storage of a REC for minimizing costs and disturbance on the low-voltage distribution grid. In [16] the optimal sizing and operation of energy communities is coupled with a study of a business model for the participation of aggregators in a REC while ensuring fair sharing of costs and revenues between all the actors. Braeuer et al [17] applied the German Tenant Electricity Law, a particular regulation in place between tenants and owners of multi-apartment buildings, to a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) optimisation model for an energy community composed of multi-apartment buildings.…”