Optimal Investment with Incentives for Renewable Energy Communities: a Stochastic Approach

After the European Union (EU) has introduced a regulation for Renewable Energy Communities (REC) in 2018, the attention on them is growing quickly. Renewable Energy Communities can be composed by citizens, small and medium-sized companies, and local administrations with the goal of self-producting and self-consuming of energy from renewable sources and, at the same time, is a way to increase the efficiency of the energy system and to reduce the environmental pollution. In this thesis we discuss about a stochastic model for optimizing investment in Renewable Energy Communities. We start from the paper [1] and we focus on a particular type of REC composed by an household and a biogas producer. In this case, the potential demand of the community is given by the household's demand, while both members produce renewable energy. In this type of REC, the biogas producer converts biogas into electricity and sells it in the electricity market, while the biogas that is not transformed into energy can be sold on the gas market. Meanwhile, the household invests in photovoltaic panels to reduce the energy purchased from the market in order to cover its own power demand, and can also sell the energy which is not self-consumed. The advantage of entering into a REC for both players is that they will be rewarded with a governmental incentive, in particular we use the incentive approved by the italian government by the "Decreto CER" [3]. We set the problem as a leader-follower problem, where the leader decides how to share the incentive, while the followers decide their own optimal installation strategy. Our goal is to find an optimal way to balance investments in renewable energies. [1] A. Awerkin P. Falbo, C. Pelizzari, T. Vargiolu, "Optimal Investment and Fair Sharing Rules of the Incentives for Renewable Energy Communities". [3] Decreto CER.