Colloquia

Samenvatting

As a method of approaching problems caused by an increase in sustainable energy
resources and the electrification of mobility, the European Union emphasises energy
communities to enable citizens to take action supporting the clean energy tran-
sition. In the Netherlands local energy communities mostly take form as energy
cooperatives. The country counts more than 700 energy cooperatives of which 86%
of the municipalities have at least one established. The Local4Local program is a
new development for energy cooperatives to take on the role of energy supplier for
local households and businesses. The problem of energy cooperatives is that they
generally only possess sustainable methods of generating electricity, creating a large
dependency on the energy market. This study sets out to investigate how different
incentives can change Local4Local participant behaviour such that they apply their
flexible energy assets, their electric vehicle (EV) and home batteries, to increase
self-sufficiency of the community.
The study conducted is two-fold, consisting of an exploratory, cross-sectional, stated
preference survey to investigate household willingness towards behavioural change.
Second, these empirical adherence probabilities are integrated into an agent-based
mathematical model to evaluate the energy community’s net grid interaction and
real-time imbalance across future scenarios from 2025 to 2045. The findings reveal
that personal financial rewards yield the highest participation, effectively minimis-
ing the day-ahead net energy exchanged with the grid. However, the simulation
also uncovers a critical trade-off: as the adoption of home batteries increases in
future scenarios, uncoordinated local asset optimisation actively amplifies real-time
forecasting errors, severely undermining the predictability of the energy community
profile. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates that while financial incentives success-
fully enhance day-ahead self-sufficiency, decentralised home batteries introduce
significant new challenges for real-time portfolio balancing.