Renewable Energy Communities Equipped With Electric Mobility Infrastructures: Energy and Economic Modeling With Flexible Market Data Conditions

Recent European directives introduced Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) as entities that promote cooperation among users of the electric system by sharing energy on a commercial level. Italy is one of the first European countries to incorporate RECs into its regulatory framework, with a governance model and specific incentive mechanisms that promote energy sharing between community members. This paper discusses the impact of tariff structures into the design of RECs, by employing a co-simulation approach that integrates residential building loads and electric mobility infrastructures. REC members can install photovoltaic and storage systems to feed their loads and can charge their electric vehicles. The electric loads corresponding to heating and cooling are also estimated using EnergyPlus, and real case studies are implemented in central Italy. Moreover, consumption data and the charging performance of electric vehicles are implemented in the model, taking into account flexible recharging conditions. The Julia tool EnergyCommunity.jl is adopted. A comparison between different market scenarios has been carried out to analyse the influence of market trends and the impact of free market conditions. The results of the proposed case study of 10 users show that introducing electric mobility is useful to increase the energy shared within the community, but the final social cost is higher due to the significant initial investment for charging stations. Market trends can strongly influence the size of the community itself, also based on the investment costs borne by the members.