Early-stage design decision-making for Community Energy Schemes

A model and an assessment framework have been developed to support the transition of residential districts from passive energy consumers to active prosumers linked within Community Energy Systems (CES). Three hypothetic districts form the case studies on which an assumed scenario was applied and examined for the financial, environmental and energy efficiency outcomes it achieves. The case studies consider houses of different types and thermal efficiencies. The results show a promising level of detail, enough to enhance decisionmaking during the early concept design of projects. The model and assessment framework can evaluate a range of applications including the transformation of old districts into CESs, the expansion of recently built CESs to include adjacent districts with older and usually less efficient dwellings and the designing of CESs for new housing developments.