Renewable energy & energy communities

A new study by Eurac Research published on the scientific journal Energies highlights the importance of renewable energy communities in driving the energy transition and integrating distributed renewable sources. Unlike previous studies that focus on residential users, this analysis examines the role of industrial and commercial members.

In partnership with the University of Trento, our researchers created a peer-to-peer sharing mechanism that combined distributed and shared storage, validated through scenarios with varied shares of non-residential users and comparing the results based on shared energy, self-consumption, and self-sufficiency indices. An effective clustering method for non-residential consumption profiles has been developed that allows to reduce 49 real industrial load profiles to 11 typical consumption curves, which included all significant properties.

"Our results indicate that incorporating a large non-residential prosumer into a renewable energy community can significantly boost the self-sufficiency and self-consumption of residential members, as well as the overall shared energy. Consequently, residential communities consistently benefit from the presence of non-residential users, with larger users having a more substantial impact" says Elisa Veronese first author of the study.

Here the complete original article