Energy remuneration mechanisms for renewable energy communities: Insights from a mixed-use district

• Community Net Metering reduces total energy costs up to 35 % through credit redistribution. • Virtual Energy Sharing boosts local self-consumption by 19 % but limits cost savings. • Peer-to-Peer trading registers cost reductions similar to Feed-in Tariffs. • Benefit-sharing strategies should align with community objectives. • Hybrid remuneration mechanisms can optimize energy and financial benefits for members. Distributed energy generation is enabling new forms of collective self-consumption and local energy sharing. While the European Union has implemented regulatory frameworks supporting renewable energy communities, Canada remains in the early stages. As regulatory frameworks evolve to support energy communities, assessing the performance of different energy remuneration mechanisms (ERMs) becomes essential to guide their implementation. This study investigates the techno-economic impacts of different ERMs and revenue redistribution strategies within an urban building energy modelling framework. The case study is a mixed-use urban district in London, Ontario, transitioning toward a solar-based energy community. The analysis compares single-building Feed-in Tariff (FiT) with community-based ERMs, namely Ontario Community Net Metering (CNM), Italy Virtual Energy Sharing (VES), and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) trading with internal dynamic pricing. Results indicate that CNM achieves the highest cost savings, reducing annual energy expenditures by up to 35 % relative to the business-as-usual scenario, primarily by maximizing the local use of solar surplus over a 12-month horizon. In contrast, VES is constrained by hourly self-consumption requirements, leading to approximately 22 % unused PV generation. P2P scenario shows variable outcomes but generally yields marginal savings over FiT. Energy-sharing strategies of annual revenues significantly impact financial outcomes, support PV size or surplus ratios at the building level. The maximisation of self-consumption generates the highest savings. Aligning temporal flexibility from CNM with collective sharing benefits from VES suggests that hybrid models may offer more resilient and equitable frameworks for energy communities.