Recent Trends of Smart Energy Communities

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, energy communities have emerged as pivotal enablers of the energy transition, fundamentally reshaping the traditional energy landscape. Even if different definitions and regulatory frameworks exist across countries, energy communities typically consist of a coalition of several end-users. Those can be equipped or not with distributed energy resources in their premises or share assets, and they can exchange and/or trade energy together. This allows for achieving more efficiency while taking advantage of heterogeneous energy usages. As such, energy communities empower end-users to become active participants in the energy transition process. They play a crucial role in advancing renewable energy adoption and integration of distributed resources.

Beyond the implementation of efficient energy management strategies, one main challenge related to communities lies in the coordination between members and the mechanisms to share/trade energy among them. Local energy markets provide one solution to enable transactions in pool or peer-to-peer fashions. In such frameworks, fairness issues emerge, and settlement methodologies shall cope with potential unmet market commitments. From the power system standpoint, another challenge is the impact of energy communities on the operational and planning strategies with new energy usage and different cost/revenue schemes that shall be considered by distribution system operators.

This Special Issue extends a warm invitation to researchers, scholars, and practitioners to contribute original research articles, reviews, and case studies on various aspects of modeling, planning, and energy/cost sharing within energy communities. Publications focusing on the following points are particularly welcome:

• Coordination strategies for the operational planning of energy communities.
• Business models, tariffs, and local energy market designs within communities.
• Settlement and post-delivery strategies for energy/cost sharing.
• Fairness and equity among community members.
• Long-term planning for the investment and expansion of energy communities.
• Services for the integration of energy communities in distribution networks.
• Impact on planning strategy and cost recovery for distribution system operators.

Dr. Rémy Rigo-Mariani
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Energies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• distribution systems
• energy market designs within communities
• energy communities
• energy transition