Fostering End Users' Flexibility in Renewable Energy Communities

Energy communities represent a new paradigm for increasing the deployment of renewable energy, contributing significantly to the decarbonisation of the electricity system through a bottom-up approach with environmental, social, and economic benefits. Energy communities are a group of entities, individuals, or companies that join together for the production, sharing and virtual exchange of electricity generated by renewable resources. They benefit from economic contributions of three types: valorisation of shared energy through the return of tariff components (distribution, transmission and avoided grid losses); incentivisation of shared energy; and payment for electricity fed into the grid. The paper focuses on the valorisation of the flexibility of end users' demand aimed at increasing economic benefits, presenting an optimization algorithm for flexibility exploitation and a techno-economic analysis with a case study of a local energy community assuming the Italian regulatory scenario.