Abstract
Energy communities have been a prominent topic since their adoption in the EU RED II Directive in 2018. However, the allocation of the economic benefit among participants and the assessment of the energy community's composition has been relatively untouched. The aim of this research is to come up with a method for distributing benefits among members in the most efficient way possible, based on their own contributions to the system. This technique will be compared to other feasible allocation strategies, and a single-objective linear programming model that considers energy exchanges and economic expenditures will be utilized to do so. The composition of energy communities has an impact on the optimization result as well as the contribution of each user: when the composition is more heterogeneous, the total effective contribution of the participants is higher, and the overall payoff in the case study increases by 12% as the heterogeneity increases from the lowest to the highest possible. Users contribute differently in this scenario, and their contribution is measured and ranges between 10% and 97%.