Fair Energy Allocation for Collective Self-consumption

This study explores a collective self-consumption community with several houses, a shared distributed energy resource (DER), and a common battery energy storage system. Each house has an energy demand over a discrete planning horizon, met either by using the DER, or the battery, or by purchasing electricity from the main power grid. Excess energy can be stored in the battery or sold back to the main grid. The objective is to determine a supply plan ensuring a fair allocation of renewable energy provided by the DER while minimizing the overall cost of the microgrid. We investigate and discuss the formulation of such an optimization problem using mixed integer linear programming. We show some dominance properties that allow the model to be reformulated into a linear program. We study some fairness metrics like the proportional allocation rule and max-min fairness. Finally, we illustrate our proposal with a real case study in France with up to seven houses and a one-day time horizon with 15-min intervals.