Article on Solar Energy Communities published in Sustainable Cities and Society
We are delighted to announce that our research on solar energy community configurations has been published open access in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society!
In this work, we analyse how a solar energy community’s configuration (number of members, share of prosumers and installed PV capacity) impact it’s techno-economic performance.
Key takeaways:
– Differences in energy community configurations (based on the number of community members, share of prosumers, and the installed solar PV system capacity) lead to performance trade-offs.
– Prosumer profitability is low after 30-50% other prosumers already exist in the community.
– The sun doesn’t always shine, and energy isn’t always demanded – community goals of high self-sufficiency (satisfy own demand by generating more energy locally) need large installed PV capacity, but that can be at odds to avoiding expensive grid upgrades (too much PV generation in the day is unable to be consumed locally and must be transmitted to the grid, can exceed grid limits)
We pin-point when these trade-offs occur, and help establish clear energy community configurations that strike a good balance between different performance metrics to maximize welfare for all stakeholders.
For more details, please visit the article here.