Modelling and Optimization of Power Allocation and Benefit Sharing in a Local Energy Community

This paper proposes a strategy for the resources management and power allocation in an energy community. Especially, the fairness of the benefit sharing is assessed thanks to a metric introduced as a monthly net energy price (in c€/kWh) from the viewpoint of each individual and computed as the individual bill over the consumed energy. The community management decouples the operational (i.e., power dispatch) from the settlement phase (i.e., monthly community billing). In particular, the investigated billing approach is based on an optimization process with an additional constraint to limit the gap between the maximum and minimum identified prices over all the community members. This study then provides a new method to better address individual’s need in the community. The results show a narrow range of the individual energy price and 11.5% collective bill reduction compared to a case where the members act individually.