Digitizing Citizen Energy Communities : A Platform Engineering Approach
Creators: name: Richter, Bent Hendrik
Publisher: name: Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)
Year: 2022

description: Low acceptance and protests against the increasing expansion of renewable generation capacities by local citizens have repeatedly slowed down the ongoing energy transition in western countries. A promising approach to address this issue is the energy community concept, for which the European Union introduced a regulatory framework within the 'Directive on common rules for the internal market for electricity'. It refers to them communities as Citizen Energy Communities. Within these communities, participants can exchange locally generated energy and the community can be represented by a digital platform, which organizes the community's continuous power distribution and financial flows. In the academic literature, these communities are discussed as a tool to actively integrate citizens into the energy system on a local level. They increase the acceptance by benefiting the local value chain and empower the energy sector's decarbonization. However, there is a lack of research on how Citizen Energy Communities can be implemented in practice and how they perform under real-world conditions. This dissertation’s contribution addresses the empirical challenges in the implementation and long-term operating of Citizen Energy Communities. The thesis reports on six studies. In the first study, the necessary IT architecture and digital building blocks are developed based on a literature review and insights from a real-world implementation for Citizen Energy Communities are described. From the resulting experiences, requirements for the individual building blocks and technologies are deducted. Researchers propose that blockchain technology can accelerate the introduction of Citizen Energy Communities. Therefore, a maturity model for blockchain-based Citizen Energy Community projects is established in the subsequent study, which allows assessing the development status of field implementations and identifying necessary next steps. In the third study, a platform-based allocation mechanism is designed, which addresses heterogeneous preferences of participants and thus enables local prices for different local energy sources. Based on an implementation, the mechanism's performance and functionality are evaluated. Besides the technical functionality, user behavior is of central importance for success. Therefore, seven user interface design principles are deducted in the fourth study based on a structured design science research process with the help of expert interviews and a behavioral laboratory experiment. In the fifth study, it is quantified and evaluated if participants are regularly active within the community, willing to pay premium prices for local renewable sources and whether they are responsive to local price signals as often assumed in the literature. The results show that Citizen Energy Communities need to be tested more thoroughly and that the platform's allocation mechanism require a low complexity or additional support systems like automated agents. As a result, the sixth study evaluates the real-world trading performance of automated agents and their impact on the platform market. The results show that a single agent among human traders can minimize the participant's cost. However, this advantage diminishes with the number of additional automated agents in the market. The thesis is concluded with an outlook and pathway for future research.