Assessing the Impacts of Community Energy Storage Systems on the German Electricity Market: An Agent-based Analysis

Distributed generation is one of the pillars of the energy transition in Germany, Europe, and around the world. Recent studies have underpinned several technical, social, and economic benefits of using Community Energy Storage systems (CES) for the aggregation of the rising number of so-called prosumers. Looking at the German electricity market and using an agent-based approach, we investigate how the deployment of CES impacts the electricity market prices and the integration of renewable energies in the market. The agent-based-model AMIRIS is used to simulate the profit and autarky maximizing operation of CES business models. The results show that the usage of CES reduces the need for curtailment of renewable energies in the market. The positive impacts are less significant if the CES is merely used to increase the autarky of energy communities.