Electricity Trading in Local Sector-coupled Energy Communities

Local energy communities are an essential part of the future decarbonized energy systems as they promise to increase participation of end-users and provide incentives for an increased utilization of local variable renewable energy and flexibility potentials. Decarbonizing the building sector will increase the use of sector-coupling technologies and introduce additional demands and flexibility potentials. Energy communities are often linked to local trading concepts or markets, but so far have excluded the effects and potentials of sector-coupled heat generation. In this work, electricity trading in communities with various technologies is formulated as a mixed complementarity problem to study their interaction and local prices. The investigation of a case study - a community with diverse end-users and a high share of renewable energy - reveals the benefits of energy communities, namely the reduction of total cost and CO2 emissions, as well as the increase of communal self-consumption. With the access to local electricity markets, the economic feasibility of combined heat and power units and heat pumps also increases. The community as a whole greatly benefits from heterogeneity of energy demand and generation characteristics of peers; and in a perfect market, each peer is also better-off participating. Therefore, the formation of local energy communities including markets should be inclusive and encourage participation of peers with sector-coupling technologies.