Congratulations to Sonam Norbu, Benoit Couraud, Valentin Robu, Merlinda Andoni and David Flynn on the acceptance of their publication “Modelling the redistribution of benefits from joint investments in community energy projects” to Elsevier’s Applied Energy journal. Applied Energy provides a forum for information on innovation, research, development and demonstration in the areas of energy conversion and conservation, the optimal use of energy resources, analysis and optimization of energy processes, mitigation of environmental pollutants, and sustainable energy systems.

Inspired by their work in the Responsive Flexibility project on Orkney, and their work with CEDRI on Indian energy communities, Smart Systems Group researchers have developed a novel method to control and share the benefits of community energy schemes. Their manuscript is available via open-source here.

The major contributions of the paper can be summarized as:

• Modelling the prosumer control algorithm for maximization of the self-consumption behind the meter.
• Incorporating the latest heuristics of battery state of health into such control algorithms, both at individual prosumer and community level.
• Exploring a number of benefit redistribution schemes (four in total, based on different parameters). Some are intuitive and based on current practice, but our research group has also proposed one based on the marginal contribution, a key coalitional game-theoretic principle. We show it achieves better performance than the others and it is also computationally tractable.