Assessing the Economic Benefit due to BESS Management in a Renewable Energy Community of a Small Island

The paper presents a study carried out on the island of Pantelleria regarding the interaction among distributed energy resource and energy storage systems in renewable energy communities. EU, in the Clean Energy Package, defines the "Jointly acting renewables self-consumers" (JARSCs) and the "Renewable Energy Communities" (RECs) as innovative models to share energy from renewables facilities. Nevertheless, the behaviour of JARSCs and RECs is designed to maximize the final users’ self-consumption without considering the impacts on the power grid operation. A comparison of various operational strategies of BESS and an investigation of their effect on the distribution network are key elements for the evolution and development of JACSRs and RECs in small islands. In the following, a model is proposed to size a PV plant and a battery storage system in an energy community and to analyse the economic impact of the management of the battery, considering the Italian regulatory framework for RECs and the peculiar conditions of the power system of Pantelleria. The Energy Community model consists of a set of electrical loads, some controllable and some not, a photovoltaic generator representing the set of generators installed at the Energy Community users and a storage system representing the set of Battery Energy Storage System of the Energy Community members.