Endogenization of Energy Sharing Mechanisms in Energy Communities Demand-Side Scheduling

The positive impacts of Energy communities in terms of economics, energy usage and network solicitation from a collective stand-point have widely been demonstrated in the literature. Nevertheless, the settlement of local exchanges and individual bills computation remain major concerns to ensure that the sharing rules are practically implementable and ensure members engagement. Among existing local market mechanisms for settling internal exchanges, the energy sharing and economic surplus sharing paradigms are the most widespread, the former being for instance implemented in Belgium (Wallonia) and France, under the formof distribution keys. In the literature and in real communities, day-ahead optimal dispatch models for the planning of flexible resources within energy communities are required, and always sharing rules-agnostic. Consequently, in this work, we first provide clear insights on the pros and cons between the energy and economic surplus sharing frameworks, by implementing a day-ahead
community optimal dispatch model and performing a quantitative comparative study on the same use case made by 8 heterogeneous domestic community members. Then, we show that community members can experience up to 14.76 % deviation between the expected key-agnostic day-ahead bill and the global community real-time one when the day-ahead dispatch model is key-agnostic and the sharing rules is applied in the settlement period despite assuming a perfect forecast of uncertain quantities. To prevent this deviation, we propose a novel formulation of the optimal dispatch model which endogenizes an energy sharing rule in the scheduling problem chosen out of the six implemented regulatory-compliant energy distribution keys. The proposed approach does not only preserve the day-ahead performances (no deviation between day-ahead and real-time bills), but also reduces the gap from the key-agnostic optimal collective bill to 11.20 %.