Energy sharing strategies in a Citizen Energy Community including vulnerable consumers

This article presents an optimization model to allocate the energy produced by a PV-coupled battery system in an energy community using the compensation mechanism available to self-consumption renewable systems up to 100 kW in Spain. The considered community incorporates public buildings, an EV charging station, and a group of households in situation of energy poverty. The evaluated scenarios considered three strategies to fairly distribute the energy among the group of vulnerable households, while minimizing costs for all members' involved. The scenarios also incorporate the use of sharing coefficients with different temporalities (annual, monthly, hourly). Our results indicate that providing vulnerable households with the same energy volume annually, but with the flexibility to allocate it differently throughout the year is the most efficient. We also found that using temporarily variable coefficients - monthly, hourly - instead of fixed annual coefficients maximizes the energy community's benefits. These results highlight the importance of the regulation introduced by the end of 2021 in Spain, which allowed the use of sharing coefficients up to an hourly level.