A data-driven methodology to design user-friendly tariffs in energy communities

Abstract

In recent years, energy communities have emerged as a feasible solution to empower domestic end-users to engage in local power trading with their neighbours, in an attempt to improve the efficiency and economy of residential consumers. From a mercantilist point of view, launching local markets with eventual local electricity prices might be beneficial for community users as they are inhibited from external volatile prices and possible market imperfections. However, local pricing strategies should take into account users’ preferences and avoid undesirable effects of response fatigue (i.e. excessive number of response signals within a short-time period). This way, local electricity tariffs should be stable and send coherent response signals easily interpretable by users. In this sense, the necessity of developing proper designing tools for local electricity tariffs is clear. This paper focuses on this issue. In particular, the main novelties of this paper are twofold: on the one hand, the developed tool designs community tariffs over a year basis instead of daily spot prices, as made in existing approaches. Thereby, the resulting tariff keeps stable yearly similar to conventional tariffs offered by retailers worldwide. Secondly, the designed tariff takes into account the negative effects of response fatigue, so that the considered pricing mechanism limits the number of pricing signals sent to consumers, taking this feature as an external parameter. This way, the designer is able to tune up the total number of pricing signals that users received within a time period, thus ensuring that they are not discouraged to partake in the community. The proposed design approach is raised as a data-driven framework, taking advantage of real databases collecting demand, renewable generation and retailer prices. Such profiles serve as inputs for a designed bi-level Stackelberg-based problem, in which the reaction of prosumers is implicitly assumed. A case study is conducted on a benchmark energy community. Different tariff mechanisms are analysed such as flat, time-of-use and happy hours tariffs. The results obtained serve to validate the new proposal as well as analyse the effect of local market mechanisms in energy communities.