Autarkity – Self-Sufficiency in Energy Communities: Expectations, Feasibility, and Obstacles
The project examines how innovative technologies can increase energy communities’ degree of self-sufficiency and whether users are actually willing to pay for it.
Energy communities appear to be a successful model in Austria. In addition to economic considerations, the need for energy security and its four factors—availability, affordability, acceptability, and accessibility—is a key motivation for interest in energy communities. Since the electricity price crisis of 2022, if not before, price stability for feed-in and procurement has been a much-discussed topic. Energy communities offer added value in this regard because energy prices can be determined within the community. This is in contrast to the complex price mechanisms of international energy markets, which depend on geopolitical situations.
Existing energy community initiatives, which typically use photovoltaics for generation, have natural limits in terms of technical and commercial independence. For instance, a photovoltaic system in our region operates at full capacity for approximately 1,000 hours, and the average self-sufficiency rate for energy communities is between 40% and 50%. Members without their own generation can achieve around 30%.
Thus, the high expectations placed on energy communities differ significantly from reality because communities that can ensure economic independence in the event of a crisis are only feasible to a limited extent.
The gap between societal needs and the current techno-economic reality could be bridged by potential enabling technologies that could make energy communities with a high degree of self-sufficiency possible in all energy sectors in the future. Examples include seasonal storage and modern heating networks.
The central innovation and unique selling point of this exploratory study is the comparison of the willingness to pay for greater energy community self-sufficiency with available technological solutions. The central research question is:
“How can the self-sufficiency of an energy community be increased through the combination of different cross-sector technologies, and how does this align with users’ actual willingness to pay for it?”
Five essential questions need to be answered centrally, laying the foundation for a larger R&D project:
- Does the desire for self-sufficiency correspond to an actual willingness to pay?
- How can the technical potential be put into practice?
- What framework conditions pose obstacles?
- What degree of self-sufficiency is economically feasible?
- What are the ecological benefits of a high degree of self-sufficiency?
The questions are accompanied by a stakeholder inclusion process. The goals of this process are to involve stakeholders and industry early on and comprehensively, establish a network for a follow-up project, and develop an implementation roadmap.
