Energy Cooperatives as an Application of Microgrids: Multi-criteria Decision Support for Investment Decisions

The future of energy generation is expected to become increasingly decentralized. Today, many customers are already more than demand units, they also act as energy producers (prosumers) and thus active participants in the energy market. The development of energy cooperatives in recent years undermines this observation. Information and communication technologies (ICT) enable management of energy cooperatives by incorporating smart meter data and energy generation data. This paper presents a MAUT-based multi-criteria decision artifact to provide decision support for energy cooperatives based on microgrids when deciding about an investment in new supply units. The findings of the literature analysis point out that energy cooperatives have economic, ecologic and social goals. However, each cooperative weights the identified goals differently according to its preferences. Within our decision artifact we define measures for the fulfilment of the goals including available data. Thus, the utility for each criterion is calculated and aggregated to an index reflecting the total utility of each new investment, e.g. the utility by an additional photovoltaic plant in the cooperative. Furthermore, we test the developed model with real-world data. The results indicate that our artifact provides useful decision support for energy cooperatives.