Shared Self-Consumption Economic Analysis for a Residential Energy Community

Abstract

Self-consumption is a growing public demand in an energy environment with growing electricity costs and decreasing photovoltaic installation costs. Shared self-consumption is an imperative aspect for bringing self-consumption into Multi-Family Residential Buildings (MRB), where most families live. Nevertheless, current legislation in most countries does not consider shared self-consumption or does not exploit its full potential; such is the case of Spain or Portugal. This paper will present a novel optimization problem for studying the economics of a shared self-consumption installation in a MRB (composed of five family demands, a PV installation and a battery) with the aim of reducing the total bill of the MRB during an entire year. The impact on energy communities of two different types of energy policies is analysed: the remuneration scheme for the surplus energy (net metering, net billing, and exclusive self-consumption policies) and the regulation for shared self-generated energy (demand-dependent, proportional output and no sharing). It is found that the regulation for the sharing energy can be more important that the remuneration scheme, which has been the traditional target of the self-consumption policy.