Revenue Metering of Unbalanced Prosumers in Energy Communities

The presence of power generating plants owned by prosumers may lead to unbalanced bidirectional energy flows at the points of connection to the relevant distribution systems. This will impact future energy communities, where appropriate metering within the community is a crucial issue for billing purposes. This paper shows that the current metrics for active energy measurement and the registration of three-phase revenue meters may fail to fairly charge unbalanced prosumers for their use of the distribution system as an inherent phase-to-phase balancer. On the other hand, it is proven here that adopting metrics based on positive sequence power/energy measurement would lead to more fair billing within the community. A comparative study was performed using a simplified but realistic model of a distribution system feeding two prosumers (i.e., an archetype of an energy community). First, representative case studies were considered. Then, a more realistic simulation of a single day of operation was conducted. The main contribution of the paper is a detailed and systematic comparison of the methods used for measuring and sorting energy into registers in revenue meters to support the ongoing discussions about fair metering within future energy communities.