13 Limitations
The conducted analyses address several sub-questions related to grid constraints, the storage and the carbon neutrality. Moreover, our analyses encompassed the examination of stochasticity and its impact on the results. However, they yet fail to yield significant findings regarding the comparison between building-scale optimisation and district-scale optimisation. Therefore, the analysis of the stochasticity effect and its related concept of pooling of energy balance is not explored as extensively as desired.
More specifically, one of the initial assumptions of this study was that optimising at the district level would yield better results compared to building-scale optimisation. However, our findings were unable to support this hypothesis, indicating the first limitation of our work. The absence of significant differences between the two scales can be explained by the prevailing electricity retail and feed-in prices, making it challenging to argue in favour for the effectiveness of energy communities. As a result of this limitation, it was not possible to demonstrate the benefits of district-level optimisation, thereby hindering any discussion on the advantages of the pooling of energy balance.
The use of energy communities to encourage pooling of energy balance was raised at the beginning of this work. We also showed that it was important to consider the question of storage. Despite obtaining results for the Vessy district, it should be noted that certain storage units yield erroneous outcomes, which may be due to an error in the data itself. Consequently, this limitation lies in the data quality.
At the beginning of the work, we presented stochasticity for the amplitude factor and the time shift. The amplitude factor was not used, leading to another limitation of this study, namely the choice of the distribution for the amplitude factor. While the Gaussian distribution’s symmetry allows for variation in both directions from the mean, the domain of the distribution in the real numbers includes negative values for the factor. This poses a challenge as negative values result in negative intensity, which makes no sense.
By acknowledging these limitations, we can establish the foundations for future researches.