Renewable Energy Communities represent an important opportunity to address the ecological transition, mitigating the effects of fossil fuel pollution and increasing the share of energy produced from renewable sources.
A renewable energy community is a not-for-profit legal entity to which individuals, businesses and public administrations can voluntarily join with the aim of generating economic, environmental and social benefits to the community’s adhering members and the area concerned.
More generally, it is a group of end users who produce, use, share, and locally manage electricity generated from renewable sources.
The following can be members of the community: citizens and households, which in turn can be passive consumers (consumers) or, at the same time, producers and consumers (prosumers); SMEs, territorial authorities and local authorities, research and training organizations, religious organizations, third sector organizations, and environmental protection organizations. Every prosumer in the community owns or has at least one renewable energy generation facility (e.g., photovoltaic). The energy produced is partly used for self-consumption and partly shared with other community members downstream of grid feed-in. At the legislative level, the energy community in Italy stems from the transposition of the European RED 2 Directive (2018/2001/EU).
The first phase of transposition, which took place through Article 42-bis of Decree Law no. 162/2019, characterized an experimental phase, showing some limitations that were overcome by the subsequent D.L. no. 199/2021.
An energy community is developed through an initial planning phase, with technical and economic feasibility study and analysis of the actors to be involved. A detailed planning follows, with local PAs involvement where relevant, and then moves on to actual design. Then the implementation, with the installation of the facilities and the creation of the collective legal entity.
And finally, the actual management of the realized community, aimed at monitoring energy flows and their optimization. The benefits are many: there is a net decrease in CO2 emissions, coupled with reduced losses for energy distribution and transport. Incentives are provided on the share of shared energy. Moreover, in the case of self-consumption, the end user will have savings on the bill downstream of a reduction in the share of energy bought from the grid. We will see the creation of new jobs, the mitigation of energy poverty and the development of new aggregations among local stakeholders. This will be accompanied by an increase in awareness and competence in the energy sector on the part of citizens, who can thus be increasingly aware of the issue of sustainability, both environmental and social.