Local Renewable Energy Community: Peer-to-Peer Trading and Dynamic Sharing versus Traditional Tariffs

Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) can enhance local renewable utilization and reduce energy costs, particularly in rural and weak-grid areas. However, REC performance strongly depends on energy sharing rules and their interaction with tariffs, peer-to-peer (P2P) trading, and network constraints. This paper proposes an optimization-based framework to compare alternative energy sharing approaches-constant, net-consumption-based, and hybrid dynamic sharing-within a rural REC. A mixed-integer linear programming model is formulated to maximize REC profit, ensuring local P2P energy sharing, and dynamic sharing between the members. The framework is demonstrated on a Portuguese rural REC case study. Results show that time-of-use pricing alone reduced REC profit by 33.4%, whereas enabling P2P trading improved local matching and increased profit by 9.0%, while net-consumption-based sharing achieved the best technical performance by minimizing grid imports and exports and increasing shared energy by 62.7% relative to constant coefficients.