Cost Allocation in an Energy Community: A Comparative Assessment of Operational Approaches

Abstract

Energy communities have become a key instrument for enhancing social impact and accelerating the deployment of renewable energy sources (RES). Nevertheless, the absence of robust economic mechanisms to allocate the costs of RESgenerated electricity among members remains a major challenge for stakeholders. This study presents a comparative assessment of three approaches for allocating energy costs among network customers with photovoltaic generation: individual selfconsumption (ISC), aggregated community (AGC), in which customers operate collectively through an internal market and fixed sharing coefficients, and collective self-consumption (CSC), formulated as a linear programming model aimed at minimizing the total community energy cost. The analysis is based on energy consumption and photovoltaic generation data from 20 customers in Burguillos, Seville. The results indicate that, compared with the ISC scenario, both community approaches reduce the total energy costs by 5.55%. However, this reduction is not necessarily associated with a cost-reflective allocation of energy costs among customers, as differences in installed PV capacity and customer consumption patterns during peak hours are not fully captured.