Socially Equitable Energy Allocation in Renewable Energy Communities through Battery Storage Management

Energy communities (ECs) are emerging as key actors in the energy transition, driven by declining renewable energy costs and supportive regulatory frameworks enabling collective self-consumption. Although fixed energy allocation coefficients provide a transparent mechanism for distributing shared photovoltaic (PV) generation, fairness considerations remain largely overlooked and, when incorporated, lead to a high price of fairness (PoF), defined as the relative increase in total system cost compared to a purely cost-optimal solution. Community-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) may help reshape this landscape. This study proposes a social justice–aware coordination framework that stands on the integration of BESS into ECs ensuring a fair, transparent, and efficient allocation of energy and benefits. The methodology is structured in three layers: safeguarding fundamental rights, implementing a hybrid multi-criteria allocation mechanism, and distributing surplus energy and associated revenues. The resulting problem, formulated as a non-convex mixed-integer nonlinear program, is relaxed and linearized into a mixed-integer linear programming model to ensure computational tractability. A case study in Gran Canaria (Spain), using real data, shows that BESS enhances equity without degrading technical performance. Whereas introducing fairness in PV-only communities increases total costs by 2.29%, incorporating BESS reduces the PoF to only 0.20%. This demonstrates that storage not only provides temporal flexibility, improving supply–demand alignment and a better renewable energy utilization, but also enables fairness constraints to be met with minimal cost impact. Overall, the proposed framework provides a practical pathway for ECs to foster a more inclusive, fair, and socially grounded energy transition.