Design of an Energy Information System for renewable energy communities

The actual paradigm for energy production is centralized and based on large power plants with a top to bottom configuration. The new challenge is to abandon as soon as possible fossil fuel power plants and to use more renewable energy resources, supporting small power plants where energy sharing and self-consumption are the main milestones. In order to achieve this transition, the best solution is to encourage the spread of Renewable Energy Communities. This thesis aims to develop an Energy Information System focused on the simulation of the community itself in order to facilitate the evaluation of a potential investment and to make conscious decision. The methodology is thought to facilitate the analysis in the early stage of energy community design. This thesis is divided in two main parts. In the first section, after a brief explanation of the current European legislative framework regarding Renewable Energy Community with a special focus on Italy, the methodology process is exposed. The simulation is divided in three main steps: in the first step the energy demand of the community is evaluated and is considered to be associated to a small industry and some residential buildings. The process developed allows to have a reliable simulation of the residential energy demand, starting from the number of families included in the community, in order to have a reliable and consistent baseline scenario. Then, the photovoltaic power plant is simulated alongside with the battery energy storage. The algorithm allows to evaluate the size of the PV plant and find the optimal size of the battery electrical storage system to achieve the best exploitation of renewable energy produced also maximising the Net Present Value. The third step includes the calculation of energy consumption/production on yearly scale of the community and the evaluation of the economic investment related to the identified energy systems. In this section the focus is on the analysis of economic investment and incentive to have comparable payback time between residential and industrial members of the community. Eventually, different KPIs are used to benchmark the obtained results. In the second part of the thesis, a small community composed by a small industry and 50 families is considered as a reference case study. In the community a photovoltaic power plant of 230 kW and a battery storage system of 350 kWh are supposed to be installed. With the configuration proposed the total yearly electricity consumption from the national grid decreases of about 68% in comparison with the baseline scenario without PV panels and storage. The overall research results and the proposed methodology demonstrated to be useful for the evaluation of consistent energy scenarios in RECs particularly useful during their early design stage.