Impact of retail electricity prices and grid tariff structure on the operation of resources scheduling in Renewable Energy Communities

We investigate the influence of retail electricity
prices on the daily operation of a REC of domestic users
connected to the public Low Voltage network. We adopt a market
design in which members may purchase their energy locally to
a community pool where the excesses of local PV generation
are mutualized, and to the classical retail markets for electricity
not produced locally. We perform a sensitivity analysis on the
retail electricity prices and measure the impact on the total REC
and members individual bills and interest in joining/leaving the
community. We test two grid costs structures: a first academic
one in which we consider quadratic costs for the upstream grid
contribution, and a second cost structure in line with the grid
tariffs currently applied in Belgium. In each case, we report
results for five billing methods (used to distribute the optimal
total REC costs among individual members), on a use-case made
by 25 domestic end-users with PV, storage and flexible appliances.