As the 20-20-20 climate-energy package comes to an end, many challenges remain for an energy transition that includes the progressive decarbonization of the economy. The European Union has set very ambitious targets for 2030, including an even more massive deployment of distributed renewable generation, and has identified the active participation of citizens in the production, consumption and sale of electricity as a key factor in achieving these targets. For this reason, the RED-II and IEM directives have introduced new schemes that allow citizens to become active participants in the energy system, producing, storing, consuming and selling their own renewable electricity, while maintaining the rights and obligations of final consumers.
The RSE study aims to analyze and promote the establishment of pilot projects of Renewable Energy Communities and Self-Consumers Acting Collectively schemes, based on the partial early implementation of these new schemes and with a view to the decision-making process leading to the full implementation of the European Directives at the end of 2021.
The 2021 activity concerns the application of methodologies for territorial, energy and environmental analyses, the preliminary sizing of generation systems for collective self-consumption and, where possible, the start of field trials. With regard to Renewable Energy Communities, the progress of the pilot projects selected by RSE, many of which are still at the preliminary study stage, is reported. For the selected collective self-consumption pilot projects, the results of the energy and economic analyses are presented.31