Measuring the Resilience of Renewable Energy Communities: A Scenario Analysis of the Regenerative Capacity

Abstract The growing adoption of decentralized renewable energy systems highlights the need to assess their resilience to disruptions. Renewable Energy Communities (RECs), composed of consumers and prosumers, rely on rooftop photovoltaic generation and peer-to-peer (P2P) energy sharing to meet local demand. Although previous studies have evaluated RECs from energy and economic perspectives, the influence of P2P network topology on resilience remains largely unexplored. This study proposes a framework that combines energy performance assessment with graph-based network vulnerability analysis to evaluate REC resilience under targeted disruption scenarios. P2P energy exchanges are simulated to construct directed, weighted energy-sharing networks, and graph-theoretic centrality measures are used to identify critical nodes whose sequential removal mimics targeted attacks. Results show that RECs provide substantial environmental and economic benefits, reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 61% of the baseline and achieving an average energy bill reduction of 22.5%. The self-consumption rate (SCR) indicates that 39.6% of locally generated renewable energy is consumed within the community, while the self-sufficiency rate (SSR) shows that local generation and P2P sharing satisfy 39.2% of total electricity demand. However, removing a small number of highly connected users significantly decreases network efficiency, highlighting the importance of increasing participation and redundancy to enhance REC robustness.