The ‘Energy Community Management’ Framework for Energy Service Providers

Abstract

Energy communities, based on distributed energy production and energy storage, will increasingly gain in importance. Such, like other self-organized communities, will exploit their full potential when well-designed rules foster cooperative behavior among its members. Until now, Smart Grid literature has neglected to integrate the individuals’ preferences for different rule-settings. Without such, integration of energy communities in Smart Grid Architecture is aggravated. We approach this urgency by presenting a bottom-up approach for rule settings among energy communities, i.e. integration of personal preferences for design-requirements. This article presents a framework, the Energy Community Management Framework, which determines the functionality of energy communities based on the individuals’ preferences for energy related rule settings, facilitating the integration of such in the Smart Grid Architecture.