A Framework for Heat Energy Community Planning with a Special Focus on Cost Sharing

While electricity-based energy communities (ECs) have received significant scientific attention, heat-based ECs have not gotten the attention they deserve. This paper builds upon the hypothesis that ECs could be a lever to increase the adoption rates of district heating and thus contribute significantly to decarbonise the heating sector. In order to unleash this presumed potential and close a research gap, a conceptual planning framework is introduced, encompassing EC-tailored heat infrastructure planning and cost sharing mechanisms to distribute the financial burden between individual participants based on transparent criteria. For the efficient and EC suitable planning of a district heating grid, a shortest path problem is solved using Dijkstra’s algorithm. To address the issue of distributing investment costs among EC participants, eight different cost sharing scenarios are developed.