Energy cooperatives as an application of microgrids: Multi-criteria investment decision support

The future of energy generation is expected to become increasingly decentralized. Today, many customers are already more than demand units, they also act as energy producers (prosumers) and thus participants in the energy market. The development of energy cooperatives with underlying microgrids in recent years undermines this observation. Information and communication technologies enable the management of energy cooperatives by incorporating data (smart meter, energy generation). We present a MAUT-based software tool to provide support for energy cooperatives when deciding about investments in new supply units. The findings of the literature analysis point out that energy cooperatives have economic, ecologic and social goals. Within our software tool we define measures for the fulfilment of the goals including available data. The utility for each goal is calculated and aggregated to an index. We test the developed software tool with real-world data. The results indicate that our artifact provides useful decision support.