Energy Communities: A review on trends, energy system modelling, business models, and optimisation objectives

Fostered by the European Union and governments worldwide, Energy Communities are promising measures aimed at promoting local energy generation and consumption, which are needed to meet the energy transition targets. Under appropriate policies, users of the Energy Community can form aggregations that collectively promote common economic, social, and environmental goals by coordinating their production and consumption in agreement with the available resources, the needs of the public market, and the policy scheme. To achieve this, the technical design and organisational structure of Energy Communities shall be coordinated to pursue the desired goals, which requires complex analyses. However, the involved mathematical modelling of the energy systems, the adopted business models, and the definition of objectives are infrequently considered. In this paper, the literature on Energy Communities is reviewed to draw the state of the art of energy communities modelling. Compared to previous studies, a focus on the inclusion and detailed description of business models and objective functions is pursued: these aspects are also analysed to provide a comprehensive scheme of the obtained model results. Given the multidisciplinary topic, a qualitative analysis highlights collaborations across nations and research fields, alongside the traditional trend analyses. The results highlight significant research opportunities at the crossroad among technical design, policy, and economics, especially when considering multi-energy and sector-coupled systems, which have rarely been considered in the energy community field.