Quantification of the Shared Energy in Energy Communities

The energy shared through collective self-consumption determines the economic savings of an energy community and the revenue losses of its electricity supplier. In this paper, we statistically explore this quantity, based on a sample of 200 hypothetical energy communities. It is found that a typical community shares (4.69 ± 1.26) % of the annual generation and demand, and, from the point of view of the electricity supplier, increases its self-consumption by (9.59 ± 2.89) %. At an annual level, the average energy shared per household is slightly lower than its average monthly electricity use. The results show that the shared energy per household increases with the size of the community, indicating that cooperation with new prosumers leads to an overall net-benefit. Finally, to address the challenge posed by the common lack of high-resolution data, the possibility of estimating the amount of energy shared in a community with a linear regression model, rather than calculating it with granular data, is briefly assessed.