Fairness-Aware Reallocation of Internal Exchanges in Energy Communities

Energy communities enable coordinated operation of distributed energy resources and local energy sharing, but cost-optimal community schedules may lead to unequal benefit distribution among members. This paper investigates the fair scheduling and settlement of internal transactions in an energy community managed by a central coordinator. The coordinator schedules internal exchanges and community storage facilities to minimize total procurement costs, because the considered regulation allows shared energy to be subtracted from that accounted for in retailer bills. However, the optimization procedure provides only one of potentially multiple optimal schedules that correspond to different benefits, such as cost reduction or revenue improvement, for each specific user. Therefore, a two stage framework for fairly allocating benefits based on calculated marginal prices in the energy community is presented. The proposed method is validated using real user data from a 351- bus, 15 kV distribution network in Italy for different community configurations and days.