Residential DER Cooperative Investments

This paper aims to model collaborative behaviours related to distributed generation investments in a residential neighbourhood, by means of Cooperative Game Theory (CGT). The main objective is to analyse the economic impact of the installation of photovoltaic solar panels and batteries, and the assessment of the potential energy savings due to the cooperation among residential households. In this regard, both the purchase of needed energy from the grid or the sale of the spare energy from the households’ self-generation to the grid are considered. The comparison between cooperative and non-cooperative behaviours in the investments and energy management decisions is analysed based on the Shapley value, a cost sharing method from CGT, concluding that cooperation among prosumers to share energy in a residential energy community is more efficient than prosumers making individual decisions. Only the case of different steps in the energy tariffs structure can destabilize the coalition constitution.