Abstract

In order to face climate and energy objectives, as reduction of GHG emission and energy independency, countries start to promote sustainable energy plans. In the research for solutions to achieve such goals, Renewable Energy Communities (REC) start to play an important role. A REC is defined as a cooperative, non-profit organization of final customers, which can involve different stakeholders, such as municipalities, local societies, public and private companies, with the purpose of self-producing and self-consuming energy from renewable sources. Recently, the Italian government introduced an incentive tariff for REC. The special feature of this tariff is that it rewards the shared energy from the installation of new renewable sources. Shared energy is defined as the demand of the community which is satisfied by the self-production of energy. In this context, two relevant problems have to be solved: the optimal investment in new technologies and a fair division of the incentive among the community members. In this talk we address this problem by modeling an energy community as a static leader-follower problem, where the leader, which can be understood as the administrator or coordinator of the REC, decides the percentage of the incentive that correspond to each member of the community, while the followers, represented by the members of the community, decide how much initially invest in new renewable energy production. We identified the optimal division of the incentive (leader) with a Nash bargaining solution. Additionally, we supposed a competitive game between the community members (followers) and we identified the initial optimal investment solution with a Nash equilibrium. We finish the talk by presenting some extension of our model, partial results and work in progress related to the optimal investment and management of energy communities.

Seminars in Probability and Finance