Italian renewable energy communities: status and prospect development analysis

• Energy Management System (EMS) for the aggregator of a Renewable Energy Community (REC) • The objective is the maximisation of the shared energy within the REC. • Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) optimisation problem. • Methodology applied to a case study REC in the North of Italy with RES plants, BESSs and EVs. • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are developed to assess the performance of the REC for two scenarios (May and December) First introduced in European directives and recently incorporated into the Italian legal framework, Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are described as innovative organisations that can promote collaboration between active and passive users engaged in the production, sharing and consumption of locally produced energy, according to creative management schemes. The aim of this study is the implementation of Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) models to build Energy Management Systems (EMSs) for an aggregator managing a REC. The REC includes Renewable Energy Sources (RESs), Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs), AC and DC charging points for Electric Vehicles (EVs), and also considers the use of Vehicle-to-Building (V2B). Specifically, the “Centralised” EMS managed by the aggregator has the aim of maximising the energy shared within the REC, while minimising BESS and EV battery degradation. The optimal profiles of active power exchanges with the network are provided as reference inputs to the local EMSs of the users. Two scenarios are considered, a week in May and a week in December, to investigate the impact of different RES productions and electricity demands on energy sharing mechanisms. Through the definition of appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), this work shows that an optimal operation of the distributed energy technologies can improve the REC performance, leading to Shared Energy Index (SEI) up to 92.42% for the considered week of May. Further scenarios are investigated considering mid-season weeks (March and October) and analysing the trade-off between maximising the shared energy and minimising battery degradation of BESSs and EVs. Finally, the impact of the users’ cooperative or non-cooperative behaviour on the global energy sharing is investigated through the analysis of multiple scenarios, varying the centralised EMS awareness about REC members’ behaviour and the configuration in terms of cooperative/non-cooperative users.

Renewable energy communities (REC) are one of the instruments to increase uptake of renewable energy (RE) sources. The EU policy underlines the necessity of citizen wide involvement in the energy system transformation processes to meet the renewable energy (RE) targets. In the article, the energy community is understood as mostly locally-rooted form of co-operation in order to jointly use RE sources with the aim of producing RE dominantly for collective self-consumption and providing socio economic benefits for REC participants and particular local areas. The article estimates the potential of the households regarding rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) uptake in Latvia. Evaluation is based on the cascade approach: starting with the technical solar PV potential, housing type analysis, then estimating the financial capacity of households and household investments statistics, finally the household willingness to invest in joint energy production is considered. As a result, REC potential to attract additional household investments to increase solar PV electricity production is calculated in the range from 43.69 MEUR to 87.42 MEUR. The REC potential to scale up RE in power generation is calculated for 76.6 GWh electricity in 2030, or 11.6% of the additional electricity from solar PV installations planned in the national energy-climate plan scenario. REC facilitating is understood as one of the policy wheels of municipal sustainable energy and climate action plans. By applying the regional model for climate change mitigation measure impact evaluation, the potential contribution of REC in greenhouse gas emission reduction and providing socio economic benefits for both REC participants and municipality are evaluated at the city level.

Citizens are set to play an active role in the energy transition by transforming from ‘passive’ consumers to ‘active’ prosumers. Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are envisioned as modes of collective prosumership by citizens under the Renewable Energy Directive of 2018 (RED II). A holistic understanding of RECs is essential to identify the benefits and challenges of collective prosumership. RECs have been the topic of several modelling studies, but a single model that simulates RECs from an integrated perspective—combining technical, economic and ecological analysis—is absent. Wide variability in the indicators discourages comparison of the results across studies. This article builds on the existing knowledge by proposing an integrated model to undertake a multi-disciplinary assessment of a potential REC. First, the proposed model analyses the technical possibilities of collective prosumership using energy flow analysis based on consumption and generation profiles. Second, the model evaluates the economic impacts of prosumership from two perspectives: from the consumers’ perspective (in terms of the annual cost of energy consumption) and from an investor’s perspective (in terms of the net present value of the investment). Thirdly, the model quantifies the annual greenhouse gas emissions of energy consumption (expressed in CO2 equivalent) to evaluate the ecological impact of prosumership. Lastly, a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) are proposed that can be used to interpret and compare the results of simulations and are mapped to the actors in the REC in line with their objectives. The proposed approach offers a single, replicable model that can be used to simulate RECs in the different Member States of the European Union. The KPIs can be used to compare the impact of combinations of various prosumership activities within the same REC or to compare two different RECs on the benefits offered vis-a-vis the investments incurred. The KPIs also offer insights into the aligning and conflicting objectives of the stakeholders of the REC.

The article juxtaposes the regulatory approach to small renewable energy sources and energy communities in the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand, highlighting such matters as the nature, character, and scope of the regulatory model of renewable energy sector. The paper also analyses energy communities in the past, current and drafted European law (as in the "Clean Energy for all Europeans" package) as well as discussing relevant legislation and policies on small renewable energy sources and energy communities in Australia and New Zealand. In this context, this article reviews the possibility of exporting the European model on energy communities outside the EU.

Based on the European guidelines—the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) and the Electricity Market Directive (EMD)—legislation to enable Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) and Citizen Energy Communities (CECs) is currently being developed in individual European countries. In July 2021, Austria, as one of the first countries in Europe, enacted legislation on both, RECs and CECs. A previous study of Fina and Fechner provided a detailed comparison of the legislative draft for energy communities in Austria, published in March 2021, to the European guidelines. Strengths and weaknesses of the Austrian transposition were highlighted and discussed. Now that the enacted version of the Austrian legislation has been published, important changes from the legislative draft to the final legislation have been identified. Building upon Fina and Fechner, this work aims at supplementing the previous study by examining and critically discussing these changes in order to present the Austrian legislation on energy communities as enacted to an international readership.

Although a clear definition of energy poverty has not been reported in the scientific literature or in general energy directives, this condition affects about 10% of European people. During the last three years, the COVID-19 pandemic combined with the increase in energy bill costs due to energy conflicts has determined the increment of energy poverty. The Renewable Energy Directive, that defines a new legal entity named Renewable Energy Community as a new end-users’ organization, recognizes the chance for low-income households to benefit from being able to access affordable energy tariffs and energy efficiency measures thanks to these new entities. Thus, this paper analyses the energy, economic, and environmental performances of a renewable energy community composed of three residential users distributed in two buildings located in the south of Italy, and one of these buildings is equipped by a rooftop photovoltaic plant. The plants were modelled and simulated through HOMERPRO simulation software while the building energy loads are real and were imported from an energy distributor dataset and were processed in the MATLAB simulation interface. The analysis concerned the comparison of the energy performance achieved by one case in which no renewable plants were installed, and by another case in which the end-users took part in the renewable energy community by sharing the photovoltaic “produced” electricity. The investigation was conducted in terms of the quantity of electricity imported from the power grid and consumed on-site, the avoided emissions, and the operating costs. The business plan has been devoted to defining the advantages of the energy community for vulnerable end-users in a popular neighborhood council estate by evaluating the social energy poverty indexes. The results showed that through the renewable energy community, a mitigation of energy poverty is obtained within a range of 12–16%.

An energy, environmental, management and economic analysis of energy efficient system towards renewable energy community: The case study of multi-purpose energy community

This study is concerned with the national transposition of the European Renewable Energy Directive into Austrian law. The objective is to estimate the economic viability for residential customers when participating in a renewable energy community (REC), focused on PV electricity sharing. The developed simulation model considers the omission of certain electricity levies as well as the obligatory proximity constraint being linked to grid levels, thus introducing a stepwise reduction of per-unit grid charges as an incentive to keep the inner-community electricity transfer as local as possible. Results show that cost savings in residential RECs cover a broad range from 9 EUR/yr to 172 EUR/yr. The lowest savings are gained by customers without in-house PV systems, while owners of a private PV system make the most profits due to the possibility of selling as well as buying electricity within the borders of the REC. Generally, cost savings increase when the source is closer to the sink, as well as when more renewable electricity is available for inner-community electricity transfer. The presence of a commercial customer impacts savings for households insignificantly, but increases local self-consumption approximately by 10%. Despite the margin for residential participants to break even being narrow, energy community operators will have to raise a certain participation fee. Such participation fee would need to be as low as 2.5 EUR/month for customers without in-house PV systems in a purely residential REC, while other customers could still achieve a break-even when paying 5 EUR/month to 6.7 EUR/month in addition. Those results should alert policy makers to find additional support mechanisms to enhance customers’ motivations to participate if RECs are meant as a concept that should be adopted on a large scale.

By 30 June 2021, EU Member States were expected to transpose the recast Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) which includes provisions for renewable energy communities (RECs) and to develop an enabling framework to promote the development of RECs. Although there is a growing number of studies analysing the emergence of various forms of community energy, comparative studies investigating the transposition and creation of enabling frameworks for RECs in a multi-level governance (MLG) perspective are scarce. This article examines the transposition in Germany and Italy and compares elements of the respective enabling frameworks. Key methods include context and MLG analysis combined with methods of descriptive (legal) studies. Insights and participatory observations of the stakeholder desks established in the Horizon2020 project COME RES complement the spectrum of methods deployed. Although community energy development is more advanced in Germany, the transposition of the RED II provisions has been slow and piecemeal so far. Conversely, in Italy, RED II played a catalyst role; the transposition has been rather dynamic and encouraged a continuous growth of REC initiatives. Nevertheless, a widespread uptake of RECs requires structural adjustments of the governance system in both countries and attention to MLG as well as vertical policy coordination.

Community energy is a buzzword that has historically included various type of experiences. In 2018, the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) legally defined renewable energy communities (RECs). Based on the first pilot projects and on the Italian legal framework, a possible REC configuration of municipal initiative with a high replicability potential is one in which a photovoltaic system is installed in educational buildings and shares energy with neighbouring residential consumers. This analysis presents an economical evaluation of different possible scenarios depending on variables such as solar radiation, system capacity, fraction of self-consumption within the REC, installation costs and energy prices. All the scenarios identified and analysed show positive economic indexes, although the energy and economic results may significantly vary depending on the variables studied. In the analysed case studies, the Net Present Value (after 20 years) is between kEUR 51 and kEUR 478; the internal rate of return is between 9.5% and 88%; the payback time is between 13.6 years and 1.1 years. The results of this analysis are relevant as they allow us to better understand the critical factors that can enable REC in providing local economic and social benefits to have a real impact on energy poverty or on the provision of local social services.

Increasing the energy efficiency of end-use equipment in the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors can reduce air pollution emissions and greenhouse gases significantly. Because energy efficiency is an effective means of reducing multi-pollutant emissions, it is important to ensure that energy efficiency is a fully engaged component of emission-reduction programs. However, while energy-efficiency measures are perceived by many stakeholders to be important options for improving air quality, some members in the air quality community are concerned about the ability of these measures to fit in a regulatory framework-in particular, the ability of emissions reductions from energy-efficiency measures to be real, quantifiable, certifiable, and enforceable. Hence, there are few air quality programs that include energy efficiency as a tool for complying with air quality regulations. This paper describes the connection between energy consumption and air quality, the potential role of energy-efficiency measures to meet air quality regulations, the barriers and challenges to the use of these measures in the air quality regulatory environment, and the potential role that the U.S. Department of Energy's (USDOE) Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's Building Technology, State and Community Programs (EERE-Buildings) could play in this area. EERE-Buildings can play a very important role in promoting energy efficiency in the air quality community, in ways that are fully consistent with its overall mission. EERE-Buildings will need to work with other stakeholders to aggressively promote energy efficiency via multiple means: publications, analytical tools, pilot programs, demonstrations, and program and policy analysis and evaluation. EERE-Buildings and state energy officials have considerable experience in implementing and monitoring energy-savings projects, as well as in designing documentation and verification requirements of energy-efficiency improvements. The following lists suggest potential EERE-Buildings activities, grouped by whether EERE-Buildings would play a lead or supporting role.

2 - The EU policy framework for energy communities

Renewable and local energy communities are viewed as a key component to the success of the energy transition. In this paper, we estimate wind power potential for such communities. Acquiring the most accurate weather data is important to support decision-making. We identify the most reliable publicly available wind speed data and demonstrate a case study for typical energy community scenarios such as a single commercial turbine at coastal and inland locations in Ireland. We describe our assessment methodology to evaluate the quality of the wind source data by comparing it with meteorological observations. We make recommendations on which publicly available wind data sources, such as reanalysis data sources (MERRA-2, ERA-5), PVGIS, and NEWA are best suited to support Renewable Energy Communities interested in exploring the possibilities of renewable wind energy. ERA5 is deemed to be the most suitable wind data source for these locations, while an anomaly is noted in the NEWA data.

With the Clean Energy Package, the European Union introduced the concept of Renewable Energy Communities: groups of citizens, small and medium enterprises and local authorities that decide to join forces to equip themselves with systems to produce and share energy from renewable energy sources. The Italian legislation recently started an experimental phase in which renewable energy communities receive an incentivising tariff for the energy produced and shared within the community. This paper faces the problem of creating a new renewable energy community in two steps. First, a mathematical model of the energy flows among the members of the community is characterised according to the Italian schema. This model is used to find the optimal portfolio for the energy community, given energy requests and local source availability. Secondly, the Shapley value, a particular solution of cooperative games known to be the most fair method to allocate costs and profits of shared infrastructures, is proposed to distribute benefits among community members. The methodology has been applied to a case study based on a real low voltage network, and the economics for consumers and producers in participating to the project have been evaluated. The proposed solution, simulated adopting real economic parameters defined in the Italian regulatory framework, results to be economically viable from the point of view of the investors with a profitability index of 1.36 and, at the same time, aligned with the social purposes of the energy communities.

Expanding the installation and use of renewable energy sources will help Europe reach its energy and climate goals. Additionally, users of small-scale photovoltaic systems will be essential to the energy transition by forming renewable energy communities (RECs). This paper offers a techno-economic analysis of the Italian REC incentive system and a suitable business model to encourage residential photovoltaic and battery installations and lower electricity costs. In this paper, we present a community model that includes a set number of prosumers, a growing number of consumers, and various configurations and management strategies for photovoltaic (PV) and battery systems. Key elements of novelty include (i) the implementation of a fully-solar REC with PV and storage under the Italian incentive scheme, (ii) the introduction a of novel centralized BESS control strategy based on firm generation that maximises energy sharing while minimising its grid impact, (iii) the economic profitability analysis of the PV and storage system for consumers and prosumers when different BESS control strategies are applied. The simulation results show that energy performance increases if a centralized battery management strategy is activated and more consumers join the community. In addition, the proposed business model shows that the best profitability is achieved when there are as many consumers as prosumers. Most importantly, the approach was extended to the extreme case of a “fully solar-powered” community, demonstrating that the REC model is viable even with the current PV and battery costs. Finally, we show that fully solar-powered communities can be easily implemented where homeowners have enough surface for PV installation and purchase a central battery through crowdfunding.