Integrated community energy systems (ICESs) are emerging as a modern development to re-organize local energy systems allowing simultaneous integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and engagement of local communities. Although local energy initiatives, such as ICESs are rapidly emerging due to community objectives, such as cost and emission reductions as well as resiliency, assessment and evaluation are still lacking on the value that these systems can provide both to the local communities as well as to the whole energy system. In this paper, we present a model-based framework to assess the value of ICESs for the local communities. The distributed energy resources-consumer adoption model (DER-CAM) based ICES model is used to assess the value of an ICES in the Netherlands. For the considered community size and local conditions, grid-connected ICESs are already beneficial to the alternative of solely being supplied from the grid both in terms of total energy costs and CO2 emissions, whereas grid-defected systems, although performing very well in terms of CO2 emission reduction, are still rather expensive.@en

Integrated Community Energy Systems (ICESs) are emerging as a modern development to re-organize the local energy systems allowing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and engagement of local communities. Although local energy initiatives such as ICESs are rapidly emerging, assessment and evaluation are still lacking on the value these systems can provide both to the local communities as well as to the whole energy system. In this paper, we present a framework to assess the value of ICESs for local communities. We apply this framework to assess the value of ICES in Spain. For a block of 10 households, investments and operations of DERs together with local exchange is simulated in DER-CAM model. For the considered community size and local conditions, ICESs are beneficial to the alternative of solely being supplied from the grid. An ICES that gets remunerated the excess energy to the grid has higher benefits than the system where energy exports are not remunerated as currently in Spain.

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