Optimizing prosumer communities for sustainable urban energy systems: A cooperative energy storage perspective

The transition toward low-carbon cities increasingly relies on community-based energy systems that integrate distributed renewable generation and shared storage infrastructure. This study examines how strategic prosumer grouping within community energy storage (CES) and shared energy storage (SES) systems can enhance the sustainability, efficiency, and resilience of urban energy networks. An optimization framework is developed to determine grouping configurations that balance heterogeneous energy production and demand under renewable uncertainty, particularly solar variability. Two community structures are compared: an individual model that clusters prosumers with similar generation characteristics, and a cooperative model that encourages resource sharing among prosumers with diverse production capacities and consumption patterns. Results indicate that cooperative grouping substantially improves system-level performance, reducing reliance on external energy supply and lowering overall procurement costs while enhancing resilience against seasonal and hourly fluctuations. By leveraging diversity within communities, the cooperative structure achieves more stable storage utilization and mitigates imbalance risks associated with renewable intermittency. Sensitivity analysis further shows that poorly designed grouping configurations can generate instability and inefficiencies, highlighting the importance of community structure in sustainable energy planning. The findings position prosumer grouping as a critical design decision in urban CES/SES deployment and offer practical insights for policymakers and planners seeking to strengthen renewable integration and support resilient, sustainable city development.