Pricing and sharing rules for energy communities

Prosumers and consumers can form together a renewable energy community (REC). Prosumers sell their production surplus to the community, which stores it or resells it to the members. To become a member, prosumers and consumers have to pay an entry fee to finance the community's assets, a battery in our example, and the management costs. Members can then buy electricity at a discounted price compared to the retail price and prosumers can sell their electricity at a premium price compared to the market price. The community should decide on those internal prices and on a sharing rule to allocate the collective self-consumption among members. In this paper, we analyze the role of prices and sharing rules to identify the communities that are feasible and the resulting allocation of the surplus among members. Depending on its objective, the REC can try to achieve an equitable allocation of the benefits among members or an efficient allocation. We use a numerical example to illustrate the resulting individual benefits for different prices and sharing rules.