Grid-informed Sharing Coefficients in Renewable Energy Communities

Abstract

The role of energy communities in grid operations is highly dependent on the spatial distribution of their participants. In particular, when local energy producers and consumers are concentrated in different feeders, economic incentives from energy communities have the potential to affect local grid congestion. To address this challenge, we propose a feeder-aware allocation strategy that reflects grid topology in energy sharing. This strategy prioritizes energy sharing within the same feeder, thus incentivizing local generation-demand balance and improving grid operation. Different sharing coefficients are tested, such as equal, proportional, and rank-based, in both static and dynamic formulations. The proposed strategy is tested on data from a real energy community, whose participants are assumed to be distributed across four feeders. The analysis is carried out from the perspectives of the community as a whole, individual feeders, and single participants. Simulation results show that the feeder-aware strategy, in addition to promoting local energy balance, leads to higher and more stable revenues for most participants.