Emerging Community Energy Ecosystems: Analysis of Organizational and Governance Structures of Selected Representative Cases

The quest to decarbonize and decentralize the current power grid has enabled high penetration of Distributed Energy Resources at the edge of the distribution network. The diversity, complexity and growing numbers of these energy resources currently pose a challenge to managing them. This has resulted in the emergence of various energy ecosystems which use diverse community-based organizational strategies and initiatives as forms of management techniques. There are also corresponding business models and governance structures that are innovative and technologically disruptive to the operations of the current grid. An analysis of five representative cases of these Renewable Energy Communities is performed using real-life projects as case studies. The focus areas considered in this study included organizational and governance structures, roles, and the relationship between key stakeholders/owners, how these ecosystems interact with the power grid, and the role of collaborations. The outcome of the study revealed that each category of ecosystem has similar organizational and governance structures although they may differently be constituted. In terms of ownership, energy cooperative, municipalities, and communities were found to own a greater share of these energy resources. Furthermore, most of these ecosystems were found to interact with the grid by supplying excess energy from the community to the power grid whilst others operate in isolation from the grid. Apart from one case, all the others showed elements of collaborations as an integral component of their mode of operations.