Toward Affordable Renewable Energy Communities: A Multi-Actor Analysis

This work aims to demonstrate the relevance of energy communities in supporting the deployment of renewables and fostering the decarbonization of local energy systems. Leveraging the benefits of a district-scale approach for integrated energy systems design, an actor-based extension of an open-source multi-objective optimization framework is developed.A actor-centered two-step MILP optimization method is proposed for designing energy communities. In the first step, a range of technical configurations for the building stock is generated. In the second step, the configuration is selected not only on economic performance, but also on its compatibility with the objectives and constraints of multiple stakeholders: tenants, landlords, the distribution system operator, and public authorities. Actor portfolios are parameterized through minimum and maximum economic boundaries, ensuring their interests are explicitly represented. A new governance entity, the \textit{energy community manager}, is introduced as a profit-oriented actor responsible for managing investments in district-level infrastructure and coordinating daily operations via an actor-based internal energy pricing scheme. The framework is demonstrated on three representative district archetypes, highlighting how actor interactions shape the optimal system design.The results indicate that meeting mobility and housing energy demands through renewable electricity leads to a more favorable outcome than a fossil-based system, reducing environmental impacts by up to 83%. By applying the actor-based modeling framework, the economic benefits of electrification and local PV generation can be fairly distributed among stakeholders. It reduces tenants’ financial burden by up to 28%, while ensuring investors still earn returns on their investments above the prevailing interest rates.A sensitivity analysis on the interest rate and the traditional trade-off between landlords' profitability and tenants' affordability enables the anticipation of bottlenecks for the deployment of local renewable energy systems. Finally, a discussion on the role of the authorities is presented, linking subsidies with the deferred global costs incurred by carbon emissions to society.