A Preference-Informed Energy Sharing Framework for a Renewable Energy Community

Local energy communities play a pivotal role in facilitating the transition towards a sustainable and environmentally-friendly energy infrastructure. This paper constructs a novel energy sharing mechanism for a centralized energy community. The proposal includes a product differentiation approach to facilitate green, local, and gray electricity distribution among the community members, ensuring a centralized preference-based sharing and promotion of sustainable practices, and an internal pricing scheme for the community market where members indirectly encounter grid and commodity costs. Initially, a compositional model is employed to measure the socio-economic preferences of members toward various energy products. Then, a product differentiation strategy is proposed based on the part-worth utilities of the preferred energy supply option. Afterward, a robust Stackelberg game is introduced between the community manager (CM) and the members to determine the community's internal electricity prices and energy exchanges. Simulation results, including the robust optimization approach and comparison with non-preference-based energy sharing optimization, demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework in terms of both benefits and energy sharing performance.