Potential of renewable energy communities in Latvia’s energy sector transformation

Abstract

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.