The Financial Benefit of Energy Consumption Behavior Diversity Within an Energy Community

Abstract

Energy communities are not yet fully self sufficient, mostly due to financial factors. Efforts are made to reduce these factors. Communities invest in community-owned assets, which provide more savings compared to individually-owned assets. Prosumers share their loads for better energy distribution, this can provide a significant impact. A good predictor for identifying the financial benefit for a community is the diversity of the consumption behaviors of the prosumers. However, an open question is how the diversity exactly affects the community costs. In this paper, we introduce Two-level K-means, an improvement on K-means, and use it on real consumption data to find energy profiles. We use the energy profiles to model communities, varying in diversity. Finally, we provide an analysis of the affects of diversity on costs. Results from the analysis show that an increased diversity factor can provide financial benefit. This is a result of residual demand being compensated by excess energy generated. However, the added financial benefit depends on the composition of the community.