New Members Selection for the Expansion of Energy Communities

Energy communities are key enablers for end-users to actively participate in the energy transition in a more consumer-centric context. This paper focuses on the expansion of existing energy communities that may need to select new members among a pool of candidates. Selection is based on heuristic methods for better explainability and to promote a transparent selection process from end-users’ perspectives. The proposed methodology is further verified with an accurate optimization-based energy management strategy. The member selection is performed in an iterative process where the best potential candidate is added as a new member of the energy community before running the same procedure over successive iterations. Simulations were performed for a complete month with a real community of six houses and nine potential candidates. The proposed rule-based method achieves similar ranks among candidates for two investigated metrics and return the same results as the more accurate optimization. Furthermore, the results show a hint on how to identify the best location (i.e., member) to install new assets that can contribute best to the energy community since it can boost the value brought by the candidates to the community. In that sense, the proposed method also serves as an investment decision support tool as well as a selection strategy for inhabitants of an energy community.