Authors:Pierre-Yves Massé, Maylis Duru, Benoit Couraud, Haicheng Ling, Solal Bizeul, Hugo Roussel, Cléa Verdot, Mariane Vittoz, Estefania Alvarez, Merlinda Andoni, Yann Rozier, Sonam Norbu, David Flynn, Erwin Franquet, Thibault Rihet

 

Abstract:

While Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) and Collective Self-Consumption (CSC) schemes
have emerged as promising tools to accelerate renewable energy adoption and support the net-zero
transition, their full potential can only be realised when complemented by demand-side flexibility
that aligns consumption with renewable generation. Water storage heaters can function as dis
tributed thermal storage, absorbing excess renewable energy at the community level. This work
quantifies both the benefits of water storage heaters flexibility for energy consumers in a CSC com
munity in France (such as energy bill reduction, increase of self-consumption), and the challenges
related to the implementation and user acceptance. At the first stage, an annual simulation analy
sis is performed on a community of 41 households and a large solar PV plant, comparing a scenario
without a CSC community, a scenario with a standard CSC community, and a scenario with a
CSC community with flexibility from water storage heaters, which showed that an average benefit
of 70€/year per household can be achieved due to flexibility and an increase of 6% and 22% of solar
PV community self-consumption and self-production respectively. In the second stage, we present
the results of the real-world deployment in the community, analysing its technical performance
and user reception, and examine the main factors shaping user engagement and satisfaction.

 

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