The role of prosumers in supporting renewable energies sources

Abstract

The present study is a part of an on-going Horizon 2020 project, named “SCORE” (Supporting Consumer Co-Ownership in Renewable Energies), which focuses on sustainable cities and communities developments goal. Particularly, this project aims at (1) overcoming usage of energy from fossil sources in favour of renewable sources, (2) increasing the energy efficiency and (3) reducing the energy consumption. Since the first project’s task was completed, i.e. identification and description of different case studies, the next one is to propose for each of them several retrofit alternatives, in order to address the above mentioned “SCORE” purposes. In this framework, the main goal of the present study is to select and rank the relevant evaluation criteria, with the aim at building an evaluative matrix, which later makes possible to analyse the feasibility of the different case studies and choice the best retrofit alternative through a Multi-Criteria analysis (MCA). The criteria were pre-selected through a literature reviews, while the final selection took place by organizing a specific working group composed by real stakeholders. The results show how the role of the working groups (one composed by energy experts and the other by evaluation experts) were fundamental since the application of the playing card method allowed to (i) select and rank the set of relevant evaluation criteria and (ii) associate a weight for each evaluation criteria. Finally, it was decided not to aggregate the results of the two expert groups in order to show and consider the difference in stakeholders’ point of view.