Empirical case study of a digitally enabled energy community with prosumers and P2P trading

Background
An ’energy community’ can add socioeconomic components to microgrids and has recently been solidified as the regulatory concept of a ’Citizen Energy Community’ by the European Union. Such energy communities can further be supplemented with digital capabilities. This paper provides insights from a 13-month case study on a digitally enabled energy community with prosumers with limited ability to provide manual demand response, who were enabled to engage in peer-to-peer trading of local energy generation.

Results
Long-term willingness to pay for local sustainable electricity in the market environment was lower than expected. Overall willingness and ability to provide manual demand response might be low. Participants’ use of the provided digital tools were at least partly driven by their desire to control energy costs.

Conclusions
Repeat interaction with the energy community’s market and its inherent complexities might limit the ability of energy communities to provide technical and economic benefits. This diminishes the appeal of corresponding business models. One direction to make energy communities more attractive to regulators and utilities is the conceptualization, design, and empirical evaluation of systems that lead to low perceived complexity for participants while enabling high levels of external automated control.