Assessment of Distributed and Centralized PV Production in an Energy Community

Abstract

Energy communities can be used to arrange co-owned local energy production. This paper assesses the cost savings potential of single-family home energy communities by comparing centralized and distributed production. The homes either have a single photovoltaic installation which production they all share, or have individual installations and share the excess energy each of them may produce. The homes in the studied energy community gain annual savings of 8.83–16.74%. When comparing the performance of the centralized and distributed systems, the difference between their economic performance is not very significant. The distributed system can provide the individual prosumers increased direct benefit, but it is more complex and more expensive to build than a centralized one.