Modeling of Renewable Energy Communities: the RECoupled approach

The increase in energy production and consumption from Renewable Energy Sources (RES) is becoming strategic to reduce CO2 emissions and to contrast climate-change related issues. In this view, EU promoted the creation of Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) to foster the sharing of local RES production among end users. Even if technological aspects of these energy systems are not critical, their complexity in management and planning is presently arising due to intermittent RES generation and end users demands. Storage solutions can contribute to RES exploitation and to the flexibility of RECs, but introducing further complexity in the system. In this context, an adequate model of the physical and management layouts of the REC becomes crucial to perform energy, economic and environmental analyses. Consequently, in this paper a modelling approach of interconnected multi-energy systems named RECoupled is proposed to simulate such RECs in the Italian context, taking into account the corresponding rules and peculiarities.