Energy communities: Current status and feasibility analysis
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School of Electrical Engineering |
Master's thesis
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en
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82
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Abstract
The European Union views energy communities as a means to restructure the energy system by placing citizens at its core. In 2022, the REPowerEU plan set a target of establishing one energy community per municipality with over 10 000 inhabitants by 2025, recognising their potential to promote a cleaner, more secure, and affordable energy system. This thesis explores the concept of energy communities and assesses the feasibility of electric energy systems composed solely of independent energy communities. It first reviews the academic literature, the European regulatory and policy framework, their use cases, and examines the current implementation status in Portugal and Finland, including the existing legal context. A network modelling approach is developed to synthetically represent energy communities in each municipality, using spatial buildings allocation and connectivity algorithms to understand their emergent characteristics. Building on these network structures, a techno-economic framework is applied to evaluate photovoltaic generation and battery storage requirements under different assumptions for both countries. The analysis highlights how geographic, demographic, and climatic factors shape the potential independence of local energy systems. The results demonstrate that while independent energy communities are technically viable in both Portugal and Finland, their implementation at municipal scale is currently economically uncompetitive and spatially constrained, particularly in densely populated urban areas. Furthermore, energy costs per kWh mainly depend on solar irradiation and not the number of participants in a community, along with energy sharing operated by citizens facing technical challenges. Besides, it emphasises the need to integrate other CO2-neutral sources and better grid connectivity for economic viability. European policy should be adaptable to local characteristics, encouraging solar installations on building rooftops when feasible and supporting cooperatives or companies that invest in large-scale clean energy projects.Description
Supervisor
Mähönen, PetriThesis advisor
Borenius, SeppoGrilo, António