Impact of Multiple Energy Communities on the Day-Ahead Market

The global energy transition calls for innovative approaches to better integrate distributed energy resources into electricity markets, and energy communities are emerging as transformative solutions. This paper examines the impact of multiple energy communities on the Day-Ahead electricity market, specifically their influence on price equilibrium and market volatility. A stochastic optimization model is developed to define a strategy for community participation in the market and two price forecasting methods, one naive and one more complex, are used. Case studies with 1, 10, and 100 energy communities illustrate the effects of scaling energy communities participation on market prices. Results show that energy communities reduce average market prices while increasing volatility and that these results are not influenced by the forecasting method.