Comparative analysis of Renewable Energy Community simulators

The first step in setting up a Renewable Energy Community (REC) is a feasibility study to assess its technical and economic sustainability as reliably as possible. This has resulted in a demand for simulation and analysis tools leading to the commercialization of numerous calculation models developed by both private companies (spreadsheets and software) and public institutions (universities, ENEA). The aim of this paper is to compare some of these simulation tools using the same case studies in order to evaluate their reliability and accuracy. In particular, the simulation tools mainly differ in the quality of the required input data in terms of energy consumption and production profiles. The preliminary results show that it is enough to know the monthly energy consumption broken down by time bands of REC’s consumers to keep the error of self-consumed energy value and shared energy value below than 5%. In addition, the results of the analysis show that RECs consisting solely of residential consumers need at least 1.5 consumers per KW of photovoltaic installation to achieve a Virtual Self- Consuming Index (VSCI) greater than 80%.