This summary report describes the research activities conducted by RSE in 2021, as part of the Work Package ‘Demonstration project on Energy Communities’ of the Project ‘Models and tools to increase energy efficiency in the electricity production, transport, and distribution cycle.’
The RSE study is aimed at analyzing and promoting the establishment of pilot projects concerning Renewable Energy Communities and Collective Self-Consumption schemes, on the basis of the early partial transposition of EU Directive 2018/2001 (RED II) into the Italian legislation through Law 8/2020 and considering the decision-making process that led to the overall transposition of the relevant European directives at the end of 2021.
The 2021 activity concerned the application of methodologies for territorial, energy and environmental analyses, the general sizing of generation systems serving collective self-consumption schemes and, where possible, initial field testing. Regarding Renewable Energy Communities, the report highlights the progress of the pilot projects selected by RSE, many of which are still in the preliminary study phase. For pilot projects concerning Self-Consumers Acting Collectively, the report presents the results of the energy and economic analyses carried out.
In addition to the experiments followed directly by RSE, the report also briefly presents the results of the mapping activity of all the initiatives born during the three-year period on the Italian territory.
The analyses provide some food for thought useful for evaluating the replicability of these new tools across the whole national territory, identifying barriers and opportunities for the various stakeholders involved at a local and supra-local level.