Empowering Energy Communities and P2P Energy Sharing: A Novel End-to-End Ecosystem for Planning, Deployment, and Operation

The widespread adoption of renewable energy sources has necessitated innovative solutions to address their inherent intermittency and facilitate energy democracy through Energy Communities (ECs). However, the successful planning, deployment, and operation of ECs face multifaceted socio-technical challenges. This publication presents a novel end-to-end ecosystem designed to foster the planning, deployment, and operation of ECs and peer-to-peer (P2P) energy relations. The ecosystem empowers stakeholders by addressing various challenges associated with the formation and management of ECs. A user-centric mobile application facilitates the identification and engagement of prospective EC members, evaluation of feasibility, and negotiation of operational, business, and financial models. The application also enables users to monitor the performance of their ECs or P2P energy-sharing relationships. An Energy Community Marketplace serves as a platform for interactions between feasible clusters and EC operators, acting as a broker to finalize the EC operator and establish connections with users' near real-time data access. The ecosystem inherently includes historical and real-time data integration based on user consent and GDPR best practices. The proposed ecosystem streamlines entire EC lifecycle, fostering active user participation, data-driven decision-making, and seamless integration of diverse stakeholders, ultimately supporting the energy transition and democratization goals.