Planning Local Energy Communities to develop low carbon urban and suburban areas

This paper presents a model of a Local Energy Community (LEC) that is a set of users that share renewable sources and storage resources to satisfy energy demand while minimising carbon emissions and operating costs. The main contribution is the design of a planner that systematically assesses a target territory to cluster buildings into LECs while maximising an objective function. The planner leverages on a LEC simulation engine and the k-medoids clustering algorithm. The development demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and the results show the effectiveness of planner. It is worth noting that the planner paves the way for the implementation of a decision support system and the design of new business-oriented applications for smart urban and sub-urban areas in the energy domain.